Neuralink Update - Brain Implants in Piggs (End of 2020)
📌Today we'll be continuing our journey with the company Neuralink. We'll be giving you a progress update on Neuralink in 2020. Check the following link for my channel to watch more interesting videos related to science and technology / @kuriouskoala
🕔Time Stamp:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Company Goals
1:46 The New Link
3:52 How to Get it?
4:32 Three Little Piggs Demo
6:36 Signal Explanation
8:25 FDA Update
9:22 Outro
📝Script:
If you remember in our past video, we mentioned that almost anything we do or think about in our body is transmitted using electrical signals in our brains. Now I want you to connect this concept to what the company is currently suggesting.
According to their scientific research, almost anyone will have some sort of neurological disorder at some point in their lives.
The company believes that they can solve almost any problem that we might face from memory loss, brain damage, addiction and even anxiety.
Remember the link that we explained in our previous video, the thing that could potentially let us control our smartphones with our minds, and how it is connected to our brain through this adaptor, except the design actually changed. This time, the team decided to go with a more coin like design stuck into the skull. They'd essentially remove part of the skull and put this instead.
The link can additionally do smarwatch functions like temperature and pressure measurements. It can also monitor your health, warn you of a possible heart attack or stroke and even plays music.
The link lasts all day but it needs to be charged at night. It'll be inductively charged, so no wires connected. If you've owned an apple watch at some point, that's an example of how inductive charging would look like.
It's a bit surprising to me that you'd have to charge it while its attached to your brain. The old design was partly detachable while this one isn't. I'm not sure of the implications of such a decision, but I'd assume this was done in order to maintain the connections in your body instead of cutting them off suddenly.
See there are many complex decision criterion involved in coming up with such a design. Would you make the design detachable and charge it separately, knowing that your abilities would be cut off which might possibly lead to confusion, or go with an attached design and charge it on your head, knowing that the heat from charging or anything else might have some dangerous implications in your brain?
In the presentation, 3 main pigs were introduced: Joice, Darthy and Gotrood, each in different Pens
Lets try and understand the readings of the brain activity. Each spot in this image represents a neural spike. A neural spike as mentioned by Elon and in the previous video tells us of neuron activity sending signals in the brain. The bottom blue curve shows the accumulation of the spikes, so if you sum them up according to the region they are being signaled in.
After we train the pig to walk on the treadmill, we can start to analyze what signals are being sent by the brain to the limbs of the pig, the hands and feet.
Why? We're going to try and predict the signals that the brain is sending, so that we know if our algorithm understands the pattern of the signals.
If our model predicts the curve right, then we're on the right path of understanding what " move left leg forward" means to the brain, get it?
If we are wrong, we train the algorithm more and more telling it what is right and what is wrong. In this curve here, we see that the team was able to predict with a high confidence interval the movements and positions of the limbs.
Project this idea into the future, and we can potentially understand different messages sent by the brain to our bodies.
Now we use this understanding of the language of the brain, and try to stimulate it with a similar signal. The red marks in this case are the electrodes firing, the green marks are the neurons responding.
In the future, by carefully controlling the electric field emitted by the electrode, you can potentially influence a 1000 to 10,000 neurons in a certain area.
Taking it a step further would be stimulating the brain at different power levels as well, as shown in the video here.
This will all be connected to your phone via bluetooth using an app.
Now in terms of the progress towards human trials, they just announced that they received "FDA Breakthrough Device designation" in July, This phase helps speed up the development, assessment, and review of this novel product, while preserving the minimum human health and safety measures required.
📒References:
📼 Neuralink Video
• Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020
📼 Intro Reference After Effects
https://velosofy.com
📼 Man injured walking
• Man walking up home ramp with crutches, pe...
🌐 FDA
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/h...
🎵 by Google