Elon Musk assures that in six months the first chip will be implanted in a human brain with Neuralink

Elon Musk during the presentation of the news of his company Neuralink, this Wednesday. Neuralink (RR. SS.)

"I could have a device implanted right now and they wouldn't even know it."

Elon Musk presented this Wednesday the latest advances from his company Neuralink, which manufactures chips to be implanted in the brain and which, as he assured, could carry out its first human test in 2023.

The joke drew laughter among those present.

"Hypothetically, it could be one of those test samples," he added, halfway between joking and serious.

The man who in recent weeks has infuriated the American left, had a brief confrontation with Apple and turned Twitter upside down, has left his role as a provocateur for a few hours to put on the mask of a visionary entrepreneur focused on technological advances.

In 2021, Neuralink posted a video of a monkey playing Pong, the Atari console video game, which copied the dynamics of ping pong.

Turned into a viral sensation with more than six million reproductions, the novelty was not only that the primate, called Pager, interacted with the game, but that he controlled the controls with his eyes.

He was playing with his brain.

The team at Musk's company had implanted two chips in both sides of his head six months earlier.

"First we trained him to play with a controller, but then we took it off and inserted the Neuralink," Musk explained.

Musk has said they've worked very hard, but they're finally ready to start human testing.

"Obviously, we want to be extremely careful and make sure it's going to work before we put it inside a human," he said.

The businessman has reported that they have already complied with the necessary paperwork before the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the body in charge of approving the use of medicines, products and surgical procedures for the public.

"I think that probably in six months we will be able to do our first Neuralink in a human," Musk said to the applause of those present.

The conference was followed by tens of thousands of people around the world.

Elon Musk holds the chip that his company Neuralink intends to implant in the human skull to measure brain activity and other applications, when he presented it, in 2021.AFP

It was precisely on Twitter that someone asked Musk about the consequences of inserting a chip, which is the size of a US 25-cent coin, into the human brain.

"Once you're in there, there's a lot of things you can do, a lot of health monitoring," Musk responded.

"You could measure body temperature to detect a fever early... You could detect a stroke early on because you would see electrical impulses from the brain, sort of like a short circuit," he added.

Musk, however, believes that the first benefit of the Neuralink implant will be to restore vision.

“Even in the cases of people who have never been able to see, who were born blind, we think we can restore their vision because the visual cortex is still there.

We are confident that we could make them see,” he noted.

Medical experts, however, take such claims with a grain of salt and some healthy disbelief.

Pager's images have been very important this Wednesday, when Neuralink has dedicated an extensive and technical presentation to talk about the progress made in recent months.

There has been talk from the evolution of the robot that inserts the chip into the brain, known as Link or R1 (which was presented in 2020), to the purification of tungsten needles, whose production time has been drastically reduced, pointing to a future serial production.

The company is endorsed by the Stanford Neuroscience Institute.

This has assured this Wednesday that there are two monkeys who have managed to successfully communicate their brain activity with a computer, through Bluetooth signals.

Images of these macaques showed that they were telepathically typing on a keyboard, without using their limbs.

They weren't typing, just moving a mouse cursor over the letters.

“This could be useful for paraplegics or paraplegics, who could control the mouse or a phone,” ventured the entrepreneur.

The team gets the apes to focus on the screen without distraction by giving them a banana milkshake that keeps them sucking while staring at the screen, just like humans on their phones.

“We are already cyborgs in a way, since computers and phones are extensions of oneself,” Musk said.

In the coming months, this first primate test group will be expanded to six monkeys, with Pager receiving updates.

Musk said the semiconductor technology, which has thousands of channels to record stimulation information, lasts "a long time without degradation."

A correct and constant update is what allows access to new functions.

It was this update that allowed Pager to use the keyboard.

Before testing the technology on monkeys, the company did experiments on sheep and pigs.

One of the videos shows the brief process with which the company's robot introduces the semiconductor at the height of the head.

It's a quick pinprick of milliseconds.

After this, however, comes a process where the wiring that allows transmission to external receivers is inserted.

These are made with thin wires, about the thickness of a hair.

In the first product, 64 of these cables were placed in about 15 minutes.

The puncture is so soft that the company's team assured that this procedure does not damage a grape.

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