As the scientist who first published data on neuronal firing in the brain of freely-behaving primates (available at: Ludvig N. et al., 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 900, pages 179-187) , I am curious to see this demonstration. I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts -- which is absolutely impossible with each and every currently available and envisioned electrophysiological technique loved or not, claimed or not, advertised or not by Musk.
> I did watch this presentation for an hour -- but it was so painful for me to experience this scene of incompetence and mockery of neuroscience getting worldwide attention simply because of Musk's money (while true scientists lose their jobs because of the lack of NIH or NSF grants for their quality research) that I add some sentences here and just leave. They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty: not just to move each microelectrode close enough to the targeted neuron but to make sure they can be kept there for long periods while not damaging the cell either. To do this, as claimed by Musk with 1,000 microelectrodes within an hour with "surgery without anesthesia", in the pulsing brain with no neurosurgeon present is not just impossible but even its proposal is an outright embarrassment for people with more education than the Twitter-audience encouraged to send their questions. Enough. Carl Sagan's prophetic 1996 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" predicted an America sinking in "superstition and darkness". This time has arrived. -- ---Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD
I must say, it does feel like history repeating itself. It seems that anyone who is an expert in a field that Musk enters ALWAYS bets against Musk.
And then, in the fullness of time, they are often proven to be wrong because Musk finds another way they couldn't imagine - probably because he works as a multi domain expert and from a viewpoint of first priciples.
It will be interesting to see if that is how this one plays out.
I work on these brain machine interfaces - the 5 billion number is made up but his point that we need high bandwidth is reasonable. I think the right answer is much lower, depending on the desired application.
He and his teams seem to have been quite successful with other businesses and ideas that were within the limits of known technology: electric cars and orbital rockets and LEO communications satellites. All of these things existed before (and all credit to the mountains of hard work of SpaceX and Tesla for polishing and improving them as much as they have).
Perhaps he’s not pushing the envelope enough if they haven’t attempted the actually impossible yet.
I’ll be cheering for them in any case; the impossible has a pesky habit of becoming possible in the decades that building some of this stuff takes. There is no shame in trying to do the impossible and failing; proving the current impossibility of hard things has value.
This is a great example of the walled garden. There is a serious issue where experts refuse to accept that outsiders can have impact on their field. Let’s say neuralink does fail, it’s still very likely they push the field forward in some meaningful ways. Most likely they will innovate on hardware pushing the curve for what is possible outwards. But sure, let’s diminish all work that isn’t done by academics as impossible and merely false advertising. Track records don’t matter if you don’t have the degree.
It's good that they are trying to do such stuff, but a lot of their goals are indeed impossible. This is like taking a running processor, connecting to a couple of its legs and trying to figure out what an operating system is currently doing.
Thank you for joining the discussion. What do you think about the counterargument that they don't need to create a full mind-body interface, that they could offer a lot of benefit just by doing simpler things like predicting limb movements?
> I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts
Wrong. I'm no brain scientist, but this fungus [1] shows the way.
If the scope of the device is sufficiently constrained it wouldn't need to interact with 5 billion neurons.
> They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty (below)
If the difficulty lies in actually embedding the implants, then a biological solution such as this fungus should be used, with the work being done to genetically engineer it to make it programmable through a device.
I'd be happy to be corrected by an actual neuroscientist, but I don't think some folks realize just how far away the Neuralink team is from being able to do any of the things they are claiming. Inserting electrodes in the brain is the easy part. The reason no one else has yet bothered with this level of miniaturization is because it won't be of much benefit until you can figure out a way to decode the signals reliably. This is extremely daunting, and it's something that has occupied lots of brilliant people full time for decades.
Well, in the update they showed themselves predicting the position of a pig's limbs as it walked on a treadmill.
If your bar is reading thoughts & dreams, you'll probably be right. But that's probably not what is needed to be useful in helping people with variety of ailments.
As an actual neuroscientist (PhD student, in a past life, now a googler), I would disagree with this part:
> Inserting electrodes in the brain is the easy part. The reason no one else has yet bothered with this level of miniaturization is because it won't be of much benefit until you can figure out a way to decode the signals reliably.
I performed and analyzed multielectrode recordings not entirely different from the ones used by Neuralink (Neuronexus is the brand if you want to look it up). These were pretty much the state of the art as far as electrode density in vivo goes. And we would absolutely have loved to have higher density. We even went so far as trying to simulate higher density by moving the electrode array around with a microdrive and repeating the stimulus.
I am quite sure the constraint is not on the demand for higher density arrays from scientists, it is more on the manufacturing side, the economics for further miniaturization are probably not there, in the absence of the Elon Musk cash spigot.
I fully agree that many of the claims Neuralink are making are quite a ways off though.
There are a half-dozen groups (companies & in academia) that are building neutral stim & recording platforms with thousands of channels & high bandwidth comms so that we can at least capture, analyse, & transmit signals to start learning & closing the feedback loop. Think of it like designing the first real integrated circuits so that we could eventually get the 8086.
This needn't be directly in the brain. E.g. there are a lot of groups looking at the parasympathetic nervous system (ie vagus nerve) for a host of organ control applications.
Been almost 5 years since I was working in the field... But there seems to have been a lot of progress already. Big limiting factor for iteration velocity is identifying viable test subjects -- elective participants aren't really an option (few volunteers, ethically questionable, & regulation); you have to find people with diseases or conditions that can justify such extreme interventions.
There is a famous quote that we should all remember today " we overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term." - Arthur C Clarke
The demo in which they were able to read limb position was pretty impressive and shows that they should be relatively close to being able to help people that have lost limb control.
The brain is also quite adaptable and learns via feedback loops so getting the electrodes 'close enough' might be sufficient along with some physical therapy.
Combining the touch detection with other devices would already be useful on its own. A phone and neuralink could work together and figure out when I'm holding it and unlock automatically and then lock it when I stop holding it. The connection between them would have to be trusted and secured of course - it would need to verify the unlock signal actually came from my device.
Getting something like x,y,z coordinates of your limbs relative to the device would be a good primitive for many features (same usefulness as acceleration and orientation sensors in phones). If that was fast and accurate enough, that could be used to control robotics.
Pairing with other devices and issuing gesture commands to them would be another possibility. Sign language might be translate-able directly to bytes.
We're talking about building Pong at this point. There will be lots of creative solutions found within the constraints.
One of my favorite facts about neural interfaces... all electronics use negative charges for communications. But neurons use positive charge in the form of calcium flow. This makes it really hard to bridge that difference.
I actually really hope that is the case. I have a feeling of existential dread every time I imagine all the effort I am putting into learning and acquiring new skills all going to waste when those tasks become absolutely second nature to everyone, irrespective of effort or time investment.
Although, I am all for fixing the existing problems that it obviously could solve; I fear my mother will succumb to Alzheimer's, and something like this is dearly needed. It just seems like we won't know when to pull the brakes.
It's hard to build a model of a system without observing it - perhaps a reason we don't know how to decode neural signals yet is that we didn't have a way to read them. I'm sure that this vastly improved sensor will lead to better models of the brain and neural activity.
I read we can decode signals reliably, but the hardware required is the size of a large desktop, so not something anyone could feasibly lug around. With that said, I think the use of GPUs is relatively new in the field, and I don't believe anyone is using ASICs, so there may be some significant gains possible.
I asked my neuroscientist friend about this a few months ago and his response was that inserting electrodes and interacting with the brain is the easy part: preventing the body from rejecting them or forming scar tissue over them after a few weeks is the hard part that nobody has been able to solve yet.
Even among neuroscientists there will be disagreements about what is possible when.
Seems to me this is a circular problem, until somebody comes along and does the miniaturization and figures out all the software and systems you need, no serious progress will be made.
I totally agree, I am totally unimpressed, Elon knows how to create hype and get smart people to do something. Smart people sometimes can't do it, it take a generation of research to access brain raw information. Codos to him to collect such smart minds but we are away 10-20 years from meaningful read and write to the brain.
Disclaimer: I truly dislike this technology for my own personal reasons.
That aside, I think the problem you bring up is pretty much "solved" as the only thing that is missing are training sets. Pretty much like when Tesla just needed a bunch of driving footage to start improving its self-driving AI, and they got it.
The first Neuralinks (I believe) will be intended to gather as much data as possible in order to tackle this concrete issue. After that is going to be a quite vanilla "big data + ML" type of job.
It would be cool to see, if different people have different neuronal dynamics for the same sort of "activity". Who knows what it will be found. Regarding "the pig demo", we don't know for sure if they can do that to any pig wearing a neuralink (i.e. like installing software) or if the data/model was produced and meant to work on that particular pig only.
I'm surprised nobody talked about the potential implications of effectively embedding, now that the device is standalone, a lithium ion battery into your skull.
I'm not a battery hater whatsoever but in the case of a thermal runoff if the battery starts burning... there is no way to get it out.
Seems like a nightmare now that I think about it, like you get a ransomware popup beamed into your visual cortex saying:
"We are in your brain, wire the contents of your bank account to the following bitcoin adres: <adress>. If you do not comply, we will blow up your neuralink, if you try to alert anyone, we will blow up your neuralink. We are watching, you have 2 hours, good luck."
Lithium ion is not one thing, one type of battery, but describes a very wide range of batteries. If you are willing to pay more and use more advanced materials for the difference parts of the battery, you can make it way secure.
We don't do that yet for cars as for the amount of batteries you need, it would make the car to expensive. However for medical devices, such batteries are already in us and with all the research into batteries today, this will improve even more.
I'm more concerned about my head being drilled open, metal put into my head and having a BLE connection. The battery is the least of my worries.
The only major technical update from its initial announcement a year ago is that they're no longer hiding the transmitter behind the participant's ear. (and pigs!)
Other than that, the whole thing seemed like a recruitment attempt, but that's fine. I fully support mission, and I'd love to work for them if given opportunity. To apply: https://jobs.lever.co/neuralink
The efforts made by Neuralink’s team are impressive and, IMO, the idea is very serious, with lots of practical short term consequences as well. Someone said that getting electrodes into the brain is the easiest part, but I beg to differ on this, for the simple reason that data is more accessible, abundant and clean than ever. Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data.
Now, on the demo and its tech: some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? The stacks I used in my embedded projects were simply horrible and I’m heavily biased against BT even on principle :D
What about the electrodes being, in the end, simple conductors and, so, antennas? I’d hate to be in a NMR machine with a NL in my head (thunderstorms too? An attacker with a jammer?!).
I was expecting a write demo too, but maybe it’s not something you want to be streamed online for the general public.
Last thought: the pig limbs prediction task. I think that the prediction was greatly aided by the chosen setting of the experiment (tapis roulant), but still impressive.
I’m sure that today we saw a very important piece of human history unfold before out very own eyes
Neuralink is a very interesting effort, but with brain-computer interfaces there is an elephant in the room that seems to be brushed off or overlooked all the time: the security of computers that get connected to your brain. You don't want something so vital to be vulnerable to buffer overflows and speculative execution attacks. I wonder if this is ever going to be addressed seriously.
If human brains merge with computers, I hope we are running free software in our heads. The idea of code you cannot observe or control, in your head, seems like an attack on humanity. I'd like to see this put into actual law from the start, possibly at the level of a UN Human Rights declaration. I'm not interested in living in a world with an app store for your brain.
As an aside, the technical capability for true mind-reading doesn't seem too far fetched anymore. I don't think society is currently structured to accept the consequences of that. People are not what they appear to be on the outside.
Sometimes I think that we are going to become the AI that Elon Musk is trying to prepare us to fight against to. This technology is literally opening pandora's box. Both the amazing and scariest thing in the world will come out. Pretty crazy times we are living. Cannot highlight this enough, we're summoning the demon hacking our brains.
This could be the contemporary equivalent of the lie detector test -- unlikely to be proven wrong for a long time, yet influential despite of questionable results.
I have to wonder if the electrodes and implants are really necessary? Mary Lou Jepsen is working on reading and writing activity to individual neurons using infrared holography -- a wearable device.
I think there are a lot of questions one might ask but I’m going to say that it’s too early to ask most of them. I’m sure that once this makes it past prototype stage and human trials are on the horizon they will need to have good questions to a lot of these questions and I have no doubt they are thinking about basic and not so basic scenarios.
This is a good PR/recruiting stunt but nothing more. (Also Musk could use a little bit of training when it comes to the way he is speaking and is timing his speech)
This absolutely should not be allowed to be done. We are treading on dangerous territory, except everyone is excitedly plodding forward without a second thought.
Unimpressed, but great work..I can see potential but this is like making a plane for landing on moon we are one decade early on this technology ...Electrode impedance is a big deal that I didn't see addressed here...It hasn't been addressed for the past decade...There are so many impressive work I see like the work by Berkeley professor Jose M. Carmena that could address this issue...next Decade can be exciting.
[+] [-] mrwnmonm|5 years ago|reply
As the scientist who first published data on neuronal firing in the brain of freely-behaving primates (available at: Ludvig N. et al., 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 900, pages 179-187) , I am curious to see this demonstration. I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts -- which is absolutely impossible with each and every currently available and envisioned electrophysiological technique loved or not, claimed or not, advertised or not by Musk.
--- Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD
Source: https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC
[+] [-] jv22222|5 years ago|reply
> I did watch this presentation for an hour -- but it was so painful for me to experience this scene of incompetence and mockery of neuroscience getting worldwide attention simply because of Musk's money (while true scientists lose their jobs because of the lack of NIH or NSF grants for their quality research) that I add some sentences here and just leave. They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty: not just to move each microelectrode close enough to the targeted neuron but to make sure they can be kept there for long periods while not damaging the cell either. To do this, as claimed by Musk with 1,000 microelectrodes within an hour with "surgery without anesthesia", in the pulsing brain with no neurosurgeon present is not just impossible but even its proposal is an outright embarrassment for people with more education than the Twitter-audience encouraged to send their questions. Enough. Carl Sagan's prophetic 1996 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" predicted an America sinking in "superstition and darkness". This time has arrived. -- ---Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD
I must say, it does feel like history repeating itself. It seems that anyone who is an expert in a field that Musk enters ALWAYS bets against Musk.
And then, in the fullness of time, they are often proven to be wrong because Musk finds another way they couldn't imagine - probably because he works as a multi domain expert and from a viewpoint of first priciples.
It will be interesting to see if that is how this one plays out.
[+] [-] etrautmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps he’s not pushing the envelope enough if they haven’t attempted the actually impossible yet.
I’ll be cheering for them in any case; the impossible has a pesky habit of becoming possible in the decades that building some of this stuff takes. There is no shame in trying to do the impossible and failing; proving the current impossibility of hard things has value.
[+] [-] nscalf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charliemil4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandanua|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinskii|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nprateem|5 years ago|reply
Wrong. I'm no brain scientist, but this fungus [1] shows the way.
If the scope of the device is sufficiently constrained it wouldn't need to interact with 5 billion neurons.
> They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty (below)
If the difficulty lies in actually embedding the implants, then a biological solution such as this fungus should be used, with the work being done to genetically engineer it to make it programmable through a device.
Just mail me my royalties.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-...
[+] [-] kevinskii|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boardwaalk|5 years ago|reply
If your bar is reading thoughts & dreams, you'll probably be right. But that's probably not what is needed to be useful in helping people with variety of ailments.
[+] [-] phreeza|5 years ago|reply
I performed and analyzed multielectrode recordings not entirely different from the ones used by Neuralink (Neuronexus is the brand if you want to look it up). These were pretty much the state of the art as far as electrode density in vivo goes. And we would absolutely have loved to have higher density. We even went so far as trying to simulate higher density by moving the electrode array around with a microdrive and repeating the stimulus.
I am quite sure the constraint is not on the demand for higher density arrays from scientists, it is more on the manufacturing side, the economics for further miniaturization are probably not there, in the absence of the Elon Musk cash spigot.
I fully agree that many of the claims Neuralink are making are quite a ways off though.
[+] [-] beambot|5 years ago|reply
This needn't be directly in the brain. E.g. there are a lot of groups looking at the parasympathetic nervous system (ie vagus nerve) for a host of organ control applications.
Been almost 5 years since I was working in the field... But there seems to have been a lot of progress already. Big limiting factor for iteration velocity is identifying viable test subjects -- elective participants aren't really an option (few volunteers, ethically questionable, & regulation); you have to find people with diseases or conditions that can justify such extreme interventions.
[+] [-] suyash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeternum|5 years ago|reply
The brain is also quite adaptable and learns via feedback loops so getting the electrodes 'close enough' might be sufficient along with some physical therapy.
[+] [-] vsareto|5 years ago|reply
Getting something like x,y,z coordinates of your limbs relative to the device would be a good primitive for many features (same usefulness as acceleration and orientation sensors in phones). If that was fast and accurate enough, that could be used to control robotics.
Pairing with other devices and issuing gesture commands to them would be another possibility. Sign language might be translate-able directly to bytes.
We're talking about building Pong at this point. There will be lots of creative solutions found within the constraints.
[+] [-] beowulfey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikkwong|5 years ago|reply
Although, I am all for fixing the existing problems that it obviously could solve; I fear my mother will succumb to Alzheimer's, and something like this is dearly needed. It just seems like we won't know when to pull the brakes.
[+] [-] leesec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterEFrank|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkersten|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickik|5 years ago|reply
Seems to me this is a circular problem, until somebody comes along and does the miniaturization and figures out all the software and systems you need, no serious progress will be made.
[+] [-] practice9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cruzai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxymoran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|5 years ago|reply
That aside, I think the problem you bring up is pretty much "solved" as the only thing that is missing are training sets. Pretty much like when Tesla just needed a bunch of driving footage to start improving its self-driving AI, and they got it.
The first Neuralinks (I believe) will be intended to gather as much data as possible in order to tackle this concrete issue. After that is going to be a quite vanilla "big data + ML" type of job.
It would be cool to see, if different people have different neuronal dynamics for the same sort of "activity". Who knows what it will be found. Regarding "the pig demo", we don't know for sure if they can do that to any pig wearing a neuralink (i.e. like installing software) or if the data/model was produced and meant to work on that particular pig only.
[+] [-] Tuxer|5 years ago|reply
I'm not a battery hater whatsoever but in the case of a thermal runoff if the battery starts burning... there is no way to get it out.
[+] [-] polytely|5 years ago|reply
"We are in your brain, wire the contents of your bank account to the following bitcoin adres: <adress>. If you do not comply, we will blow up your neuralink, if you try to alert anyone, we will blow up your neuralink. We are watching, you have 2 hours, good luck."
"01:59:59"
"01:59:58"
...
[+] [-] nickik|5 years ago|reply
We don't do that yet for cars as for the amount of batteries you need, it would make the car to expensive. However for medical devices, such batteries are already in us and with all the research into batteries today, this will improve even more.
I'm more concerned about my head being drilled open, metal put into my head and having a BLE connection. The battery is the least of my worries.
[+] [-] BillinghamJ|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m0dE|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spullara|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torotonnato|5 years ago|reply
Now, on the demo and its tech: some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? The stacks I used in my embedded projects were simply horrible and I’m heavily biased against BT even on principle :D
What about the electrodes being, in the end, simple conductors and, so, antennas? I’d hate to be in a NMR machine with a NL in my head (thunderstorms too? An attacker with a jammer?!).
I was expecting a write demo too, but maybe it’s not something you want to be streamed online for the general public.
Last thought: the pig limbs prediction task. I think that the prediction was greatly aided by the chosen setting of the experiment (tapis roulant), but still impressive. I’m sure that today we saw a very important piece of human history unfold before out very own eyes
[+] [-] mepian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etaioinshrdlu|5 years ago|reply
As an aside, the technical capability for true mind-reading doesn't seem too far fetched anymore. I don't think society is currently structured to accept the consequences of that. People are not what they appear to be on the outside.
[+] [-] ofou|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackbear_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tryauuum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ofou|5 years ago|reply
The Good: Explore by direct observation/interaction the brain, cure countless disseases along the way, and eventually augment humans.
The Bad: Privacy, Hacking, identity theft, memory implants, infinite dystopias.
The Ugly: The rich/poor divide will be cognitive.
[+] [-] jv22222|5 years ago|reply
It's probably all those movies written about the subject (ie Matrix) that add to the uneasiness.
I like how he focuses on safety aspects and that it's reversible etc.
[+] [-] andai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerbal2000|5 years ago|reply
Those types of electrodes are known to cause permanent brain tissue scaring after 1-3 years, similar to asbestos scaring.
How do they intend to solve this problem?
[+] [-] rantwasp|5 years ago|reply
This is a good PR/recruiting stunt but nothing more. (Also Musk could use a little bit of training when it comes to the way he is speaking and is timing his speech)
[+] [-] ethanwillis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cruzai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|5 years ago|reply