ALBAWABA - On Friday, Elon Musk announced that his neural implant firm, Neuralink, had successfully implanted its second brain chip into a human patient, as part of a podcast discussion with Lex Fridman.
Musk made the news public that a second Neuralink brain chip implant had been successful up to this point, mentioning how rapidly he believes the number of human participants will keep rising.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” the CEO said, adding that “there’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well.”
Founded by Elon Musk with a team of seven scientists and engineers in 2016, Neuralink is leading the field in the development of brain-implanted microchips that are intended to monitor and stimulate brain activity. The company hopes that in the near future, this technology could help improve natural senses like eyesight and maybe even treat neurological ailments.
“Let's give people superpowers,” Musk said to Lex Fridman during the podcast episode.
Neuralink is conducting clinical studies using the implant technology on patients who are quadriplegic after sustaining either damage to the spinal cord or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALC) through its PRIME program, as reported by Teslarati. The primary objective of the implants is to enable patients to use just their mental abilities to operate an external device, like a computer's mouse.
Neuralink's N1 brain-computer chip, which is about the size of a quarter, uses more than 1,000 electrodes spaced over hundreds of different fibers that are individually thinner than a human hair to capture and send brain activity.
According to Musk, Neuralink technology will one day be able to restore damaged neurons, helping those who suffer from conditions like paralysis and blindness. He notes that “It can also solve, probably, schizophrenia if people have seizures of some kind.”
