Musk’s brain interface implanted in a human

“The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” tweeted Elon Musk yesterday. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”

Neuralink is Musk’s electronic brain interface company, developing implants with connections to thousands of in-brain electrodes.

Its goal, the company has said, is to enable people with paralysis to “directly use their neural activity to operate computers and mobile devices with speed and ease”.

The company is also developing a robot that can automatically install the electrodes into a living brain.

In a 2019 whitepaper, Musk described the concept, with 32 electrodes on each ‘thread’, with up to 96 threads installed by the robot “with micron precision for avoidance of surface vasculature and targeting specific brain regions”.

Animal trials have been on-going.

In 2021, a macaque monkey played the video game ‘Pong’ via a 1,024 electrode implanted device.

The 2019 whitepaper is An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels, published on the Biorxiv pre-print service.

This Neuralink page has details of the macaque monkey research