This is content as of December 2022 that has been officially released by Neuralink. What follows is information that is presented by Neuralink. This way you won’t miss a thing and have it all in one place. Neuralink is led by Elon Musk and a team of exceptionally talented people. All credit belongs to them.
By now there is a lot of information by others about Neuralink, which will not be mentioned here. The only outside resource since Elon Musk referenced it in the past and it is prerequisite reading is WaitButWhy’s Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future:
Neuralink is building breakthrough technology for the brain
In a 2019 white paper, Neuralink outlined the design of their novel electrodes and their unique surgical approach, along with preliminary electrophysiology obtained in a rodent model. That generation of the Link had wired leads and a connector that protruded through the skin, and was an important platform for developing and validating our robotic surgical approach and their ultra low-power custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for amplifying and processing neural signals. In 2020, they publicly shared a wireless version of the Link that was able to stream 1,024 channels of action potentials (also called “spikes”) wirelessly and in real time. They demonstrated its functionality by recording somatosensory (touch) signals in pigs exploring their environment. The electrodes were placed in a part of the brain involved in processing signals from the pig’s exquisitely sensitive snout. As it snuffled about, the responses of the neurons to sensory cues could be readily observed.
Neuralink is creating the future of brain-machine interfaces: building devices now that will help people with paralysis and inventing new technologies that will expand our abilities, our community, and our world. Neuralink’s goal is to build a system with at least two orders of magnitude more communication channels (electrodes) than current clinically-approved devices. This system needs to be safe, it must have fully wireless communication through the skin, and it has to be ready for patients to take home and use on their own. Their device, called the Link, will be able to record from 1024 electrodes and is designed to meet these criteria.
In July 2021, Neuralink announced a Series C funding round for $205M. They are using this funding to accelerate their efforts to safely bring this technology to the world. The sooner they do that, the sooner they can help people in need who could benefit from a Neuralink device.
This is how Elon Musk has defined Neuralink’s mission and has already hinted as to what the first product might be:
If you can’t beat em, join em
Neuralink mission statement
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Great review! Neuralink is open to working with neuroscientists to advance the field.
Short-term goal is addressing brain & spine problems.
Ultimate goal is symbiosis of human & machine intelligence.
First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs
A short introduction to your brain
Understanding the brain
A web of communication that allows you to move, think, feel and sense. There are 86 billion neurons in your brain. Neurons send and receive information. Although neurons come in many different types, they generally have three parts: a dendrite which receives a signal, a cell body called a soma which computes the signal, and an axon which sends a signal out.
Neurons are connected through synapses
The neurons of your brain connect to each other to send and receive signals through axon-dendrite connections called synapses.
Neurons communicate through electric signals
Action potentials cause synapses to release neurotransmitters. These small molecules bind to receptors on dendrites, opening channels that cause current to flow across the neuron’s membrane. When a neuron receives the ‘right’ combination of spatiotemporal synaptic input, it initiates an action potential.
We can record electrical signals in the brain
Neuralink places electrodes near neurons in order to detect action potentials. Recording from many neurons allows us to decode the information represented by those cells. In the movement-related areas of the brain, for example, neurons represent intended movements. There are neurons in the brain that carry information about everything we see, feel, touch, or think.
Why do electrodes need to be connected directly to the brain?
Neural activity can be monitored from outside the head using non-invasive techniques such as EEG. With these non-invasive techniques, each channel records the summed activity of millions of neurons, which means the details are blurred away. Imagine experiencing a sports event through a microphone placed outside the stadium. From the roars or groans of the crowd you can tell when something good or bad happens to the home team, but you’ll have a hard time distinguishing whether they scored or made a great defensive play and you certainly wouldn’t be able to hear what individual people were saying about the game. The same is true for recording from the brain: recordings made at a distance provide some useful, high-level information, but to access fine-scale information, you need to be close to the source. Here, that means recording action potentials, or “spikes,” from individual neurons. Currently, that can only be done by placing electrodes inside the brain.
How does neural stimulation work?
The knowledge that electric currents activate muscles and nerves is almost as old as the knowledge of electricity itself. When small currents are delivered through an electrode, the changing electric field drives nearby neurons to fire one or more action potentials. By stimulating in specific temporal sequences across many electrodes, it is possible to create patterns of activity that elicit a desired sensation, for example the feel of an object in the hand or a visual image. Stimulation can also reduce or eliminate the pathological patterns of activity that occur in neurological disorders, such as reducing movement deficits in Parkinson’s disease.
What is Neuralink’s approach?
Neuralink is innovating by pushing the boundaries of neural engineering.
The Link
We’re aiming to design a fully implantable, cosmetically invisible brain-computer interface to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go. Micron-scale threads would be inserted into areas of the brain that control movement. Each thread contains many electrodes and connects them to an implant called the “Link.”
Link: Sealed, implanted device that processes and transmits neural signals.
Neural threads: Each small and flexible thread contains many electrodes for detecting neural signals.
Charger: Compact inductive charger wirelessly connects to the implant to charge the battery from the outside.
Precision Automated Neurosurgery: The threads on the Link are so fine and flexible that they can’t be inserted by the human hand. Instead, we are building a robotic system that is designed to reliably and efficiently insert these threads exactly where the neurosurgeon wants them to be.
The Neuralink App: The Neuralink app is being designed to allow you to control your keyboard and mouse directly with the activity of your brain, just by thinking about it. The Neuralink app would guide you through exercises that would teach you to control your device. With a Bluetooth connection, you would be able to potentially control any mouse or keyboard with your thoughts.
What is Neuralink developing?
Neuralink is building a fully integrated Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system. Sometimes you’ll see this called a brain-machine interface (BMI). Either way, BCIs are technologies that enable a computer or other digital device to be controlled directly with brain activity. For example, prior research has demonstrated that a person with paralysis can control a computer mouse or keyboard just by thinking about how they want to move. Our goal is to build a system that is safe, fully implanted and cosmetically invisible, available at home or out and about, and usable without assistance. Our device, called the Link, aims to record from 1024 electrodes and is being designed to meet these criteria.
What are the biggest challenges in making a scalable BCI?
Neuralink’s technology builds on decades of BCI research in academic labs, some of which is currently being tested in ongoing clinical studies. The BCI systems used in these aforementioned studies have no more than a few hundred electrodes with connectors that pass through the skin. Their use also requires laboratory equipment and personnel to be present. Neuralink’s challenge is to build a safe and effective BCI that is wireless and fully implanted, scales up the number of electrodes, removes the need for external equipment (other than the device being controlled), and that users can take anywhere and operate by themselves. Recent engineering advances in the field and new technologies developed at Neuralink are paving the way for progress on each of these key technical hurdles.
Electrodes: In order to optimize the compatibility of their threads with the surrounding tissue, Neuralink believes that they should be on the same size scale as neighboring neurons and as flexible as possible. The threads also have to resist corrosion from fluid in the tissue. Therefore, they microfabricate the threads out of thin film metals and polymers. To meet these criteria, Neuralink has developed new microfabrication processes and made advances in materials science. These include the integration of corrosion-resistant adhesion layers to the threads and rough electrode materials that increase their effective surface area without increasing their size.
Chips: Our Link needs to convert the small electrical signals recorded by each electrode into real-time neural information. Since the neural signals in the brain are small (microvolts), the Link must have high-performance signal amplifiers and digitizers. Also, as the number of electrodes increases, these raw signals become too much information to upload with low power devices. Scaling our devices requires on-chip, real-time identification and characterization of neural spikes. Their custom chips on the Link meet these goals, while radically reducing per-channel chip size and power consumption compared to current technology.
Hermetic Packaging: The Link needs to be protected from the fluid and salts in the brain. Making a water-proof enclosure can be hard, and it’s even harder when that enclosure must be constructed from biocompatible materials, replace the skull structurally, and allow over 1,000 electrical channels to pass through it. To meet this challenge, Neuralink is developing innovative techniques to build and seal each major component of the package. For example, by replacing the connection of multiple components with a process that builds them as a single component, they can decrease device size and eliminate a potential failure point.
Neurosurgery: Neuralink’s threads are too fine to be manipulated by hand and too flexible to go into the brain on their own (imagine trying to sew a button with thread but no needle). Yet, they need to safely insert them with precision and efficiency. They are innovating on robot design, imaging systems, and software to build a robot that can precisely and efficiently insert many threads through a single 25 mm skull opening while actively avoiding blood vessels on the surface of the brain.
Neural decoding: Neural spikes contain a lot of information, but that information has to be decoded in order to use it for controlling a computer. Academic labs have designed computer algorithms to control a virtual computer mouse from the activity of hundreds of neurons. Neuralink’s device is intended to record from over an order of magnitude more neurons, which we hope will provide more precise and naturalistic control of electronic devices. To accomplish this, Neuralink is building on recent advances in statistics and algorithm design to improve the efficacy and robustness of neural decoding. One challenge is to design adaptive algorithms that maintain reliable and robust performance while continuing to improve over time. Ultimately, they want these algorithms to run in real time on the implanted device itself.
How does the Neuralink device differ from other BCI devices?
There are currently only a few approved BCI devices that record from and/or stimulate the human brain, including devices for deep brain stimulation (DBS), which can treat neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and devices for the detection and disruption of seizures. These approved devices are designed to modulate neural activity over large brain areas, not to transfer information to and from the brain. Therefore, they generally have a small number of electrodes (less than 10), and these electrodes are much larger than our threads. For example, DBS leads have only 4–8 electrodes and are about 800 times larger in diameter.
There are also non-Neuralink BCI devices being tested in pilot clinical trials. However, none of these devices have more than a few hundred electrodes, and they are all either placed on the surface of the brain or in fixed arrays of single rigid electrodes. The Link is being designed with an order of magnitude more electrodes and with flexible threads that are individually placed to avoid blood vessels and to best cover the brain region of interest.
We are also designing the Link to provide unprecedented scale, with over 1024 channels of information from the brain. The Link is also being designed to perform real-time spike detection on every channel and to send this data wirelessly.
Engineering with the brain
A Direct Link Between the Brain & Everyday Technology
The initial goal of Neuralink’s technology is to help people with paralysis regain independence through the control of computers and mobile devices. Their devices are therefore currently being designed to one day give people the ability to communicate more easily via text or speech synthesis, to follow their curiosity on the web, or to express their creativity through photography, art, or writing apps.
The Future of Neural Engineering
The Link is a starting point for a new kind of brain-computer interface. As Neuralink’s technology develops, they want to be able to increase the channels of communication with the brain, accessing more brain areas and new kinds of neural information. We believe this technology has the potential to treat a wide range of neurological disorders, to restore sensory and motor function, and eventually to expand how we interact with each other and experience the world around us.
What will the Link do?
Neuralink is designing the Link to connect to thousands of neurons in the brain, so that it may one day be able to record the activity of these neurons, process these signals in real time, and translate intended movements directly into the control of an external device. As a first application of their technology, they hope to help people with quadriplegia by giving them the ability to control computers and mobile devices directly with their thoughts. They would start by recording neural activity in the brain’s movement areas. As users think about moving their arms or hands, Neuralink would decode those intentions, which would be sent over Bluetooth to the user’s computer. Users would initially learn to control a virtual mouse. Later, as users get more practice and Neuralink’s adaptive decoding algorithms continue to improve, they expect that users would be able to control multiple devices, including a keyboard or a game controller.
Will the Link be safe?
As of 2022, Neuralink has not yet begun clinical trials, and so they do not have safety data in humans, but safety has been at the core of the design process. In particular, the Link includes technical innovations intended to improve the safety of the surgical procedure compared to existing BCI devices or traditional neurosurgery. Here are a few examples:
There is always risk associated with general anesthesia, and that risk is reduced by shortening the time of the procedure. We’re designing the Neurosurgical Robot so that it will be capable of efficient and reliable electrode insertion. Also, the robot is being designed to insert threads through a hole in the skull as small as 25 mm in diameter. Combined with other advancements in robotic surgical tooling, this may eventually allow us to eliminate general anesthesia and implant the device under conscious sedation.
Inserting a device into the brain always carries some risk of bleeding. Neuralink is trying to reduce that risk by using micron-scale threads, inserted with a needle whose diameter is about the size of many neurons in the brain. Furthermore, because each thread is individually inserted, the Neurosurgical Robot is being designed so that it will aim each thread to avoid damaging blood vessels at or near the surface of the brain.
Who will the Link help?
Neuralink hopes their first application will enable people with quadriplegia to control a point-and-click computer cursor. They believe there are many other potential future applications for the Link. These may include restoring motor, sensory, and visual function, as well as treatment of neurological disorders.
Will the Link be available to the general population?
Neuralink is currently focused on developing medical devices. They believe these devices have the potential to help people with a wide range of injuries and neurological disorders, and they hope to develop treatments for many of these conditions in the coming years. They expect that as their devices continue to scale, and as they learn to communicate with more areas of the brain, they will discover new, non-medical applications for our BCIs. Neuralink’s long-term vision is to create BCIs that are sufficiently safe and powerful that the general population would want to have them.
How will you address device security?
Neuralink understands that medical devices need to be secure and it takes serious engineering to prevent unwanted access to such devices. Security will be built into every layer of the product through strong cryptography, defensive engineering, and extensive security auditing.
Animal care at Neuralink
Animals at Neuralink are respected and honored by our team. Without proper context, information from medical records and study data can be misleading. In this blog post, they provide an accurate statement of Neuralink’s commitment to animal welfare.
https://neuralink.com/blog/animal-welfare/
A blog entry about animal care: https://neuralink.com/blog/championing-the-three-rs/ and https://neuralink.com/blog/husbandry/
Here you can watch Pager, a nine year old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCul1sp4hQ
If you’re interested to learn more about it, Neuralink also published an article: https://neuralink.com/blog/monkey-mindpong/
Join Neuralink’s Patient Registry
If you’re interested in learning whether you may qualify for future Neuralink clinical trials, consider joining our Patient Registry
https://neuralink.com/patient-registry/application-instructions/
Neuralink believes that the best way to design a product for people with disabilities is by collaborating with people with disabilities. To this end, Neuralink has been working for several years with a Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) composed of people with lived experience with quadriplegia. From research and engineering to product development, the CAB provides the end-user perspective to help them to create the world’s most empowering and user-friendly BCI.
What kind of people is Neuralink looking for?
Developing neural interfaces is an interdisciplinary challenge. They are looking to hire a wide range of people with diverse engineering, scientific, and operations expertise.
They are looking for software engineers to enable telepathy. The first human app will allow a paralyzed person to regain their digital freedom by telepathically controlling their phone/computer in an effortless way.
They are scaling Neuralink’s first implant product for clinical trials and creating the next-generation implant that is >10x number of channels and computational capabilities — all in the same footprint! They are looking for talented EEs and MEs.
Neuralink is more vertically integrated than you’d think because there’s often no vendor capable of completing their task. We also iterate more quickly with more in house. This makes having excellent manufacturing and equipment engineers critical.
Elon Musk also stated on Twitter in July 2020 that if you’ve solved hard problems with phones / wearables (sealing, signal processing, inductive charging, power management, etc), you should consider working at Neuralink.
Neuralink is striving to improve the lives of countless individuals through our high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces. This cutting-edge technology is being developed by a talented and mission-driven team whose diverse perspectives and lived experiences strengthen our ability to creatively problem solve. To elevate and celebrate our diversity, they apply their creative problem solving skills to all aspects of life at Neuralink, from the moment a potential applicant hears our name to the everyday employee experience. They insist on equitable practices not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it helps them develop the best possible product by enabling each employee to realize their full potential in an environment where they know they belong.
Neuralink Presentations
Neuralink 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAMt56p_j8
Neuralink Show and Tell, Fall 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4
Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvmgjBL74w
Neuralink Launch Event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbh3t7WVI
Neuralink References:
https://neuralink.com
https://twitter.com/neuralink
https://youtube.com/@neuralink
https://boards.greenhouse.io/neuralink
Email: info@neuralink.com