Introduction
When you think of brain implants, you often associate it with science fiction, but in today’s day and age, brain implants, also called neuroprosthetics, are a part of the world right now. In fact, brain implants have been around for much longer than many people think. For example, thousands of patients with Parkinson’s disease have brain implants that send electrical pulses to their brains to help them with their motor control. These brain implants for Parkinson’s disease have been around since the 1980s, and have become more advanced since then. In 2023, different scientists and organizations are trying to take brain implants to the next level, and are conducting experiments that may revolutionize the world.
Duke Implant
A team of Duke neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers recently developed a prosthetic that can decode the signals within a user’s brain to predict the sounds the user is trying to articulate. Brain implant technology has experienced a recent boom, with millions being poured into research and development. So why would this device be relevant? This prosthetic would allow people who experience muteness to communicate with others. Unfortunately, the speech decoding is very slow–about 78 words per minute, while the average person speaks at 150 words per minute. To create a faster and more efficient system for this device, leading scientist Greg Cogan, Ph.D. collaborated with colleague faculty member Jonathan Viventi, Ph.D., whose biomedical engineering group specializes in creating ultra-thin, flexible, high-density brain sensors to overcome previous constraints.
In order to complete this research, Viventi and his colleagues managed to cram an astounding 256 tiny brain sensors onto a flexible, medical-grade plastic piece the size of a postage stamp. To make accurate predictions about intended speech, it is vital to separate signals from neighboring brain cells, as neurons that are only a few sand grains’ distance apart can have dramatically diverse activity patterns when coordinating speech. In order to conduct the experiment, the researchers had to temporarily implant the device in patients undergoing brain surgery for a different reason, like treating Parkinson’s disease or removing a tumor.
It was an easy listen-and-repeat exercise. After hearing a string of absurd phrases like “ava,” “kug,” or “vip,” participants had to say each one out loud. As the device coordinated the movement of around 100 muscles that move the lips, tongue, jaw, and larynx, it recorded activity from the speech motor cortex of each patient. This speech data was then taken and put into an algorithm to test how accurate their predictions were.
The results: the first string of sounds had an 84% accuracy rate, which was more than expected. In the end, the decoder has a 40% accuracy rate, which may seem like a poor score, but a much needed upgrade from previous systems that received a 20% accuracy rate after processing for hours and even days. Recently, Cogan’s team has been given a grant of 2.4 million dollars for the National Institutes of Health to create a cordless version of this device. It may take years before this instrument is available in stores, but Cogan and Viventi are very optimistic, and are ecstatic to see the trajectory on which the project is going.
Elon Musk Implant
Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which he co-founded in 2016, recently got approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration to launch human trials for brain implants. Previously, the FDA had denied permission for human testing due to several safety concerns including the chip overheating and moving around in someone’s head. After the long awaited approval, Musk and his company started to recruit people–particularly people with paralysis in all four limbs or people who were diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is a fatal type of motor neuron disease that causes weakness of muscles, difficulty speaking, problems with coordination, overactive reflexes, etc. The goal of these brain implants was to aid people with neurological disorders, but the future aspiration is for domestic usage, such as playing games and messaging using one’s thoughts.
The first step in conducting human trials was finding a participant. Although there was an “outpouring of interest,” according to Insider, the company was still searching for participants who were willing to have a part of their skull removed in order to insert electrodes and super-thin wires into their brains.
One of Musk’s missions was to make the surgery efficient and timeless. The first part of the surgery, the craniectomy, would take a couple of hours. Next, the robot would insert the device and an ultra-thin array of about 64 threads (which were each one-fourteenth the width of a singular human hair). This procedure would take 25 minutes and the device would replace the original part of the skull that was removed. As of now, 155 implantation surgeries have been conducted on animals, but Musk wanted the surgery to be even quicker, and done without human help.
Competition
Although Musk has received permission for human trials, he claims that he still has a lot of competition to deal with, and that they are currently farther along than he is. For example, Synchron and Onward, two brain-computer start ups, have already been in the human trial era for much longer than Musk’s company has been. In fact, Synchron implanted its first device into a U.S. patient in July of 2022. Furthermore, Synchron had one of its Australian patients send a Tweet using only his thoughts in December of 2021.
Even though Musk wants to pick up pace and rapidly expedite this process, one of Musk’s representatives claims that you can’t just use trial-and-error. (Musk’s first three rockets for SpaceX exploded since humans were involved.) This process has to be very cautionary and every step must be perfected before it is tried on humans.
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