Welcome to Neuralink Live Update. We're gonna tell you about the progress of the first patient with the neuralink olland and sort of your recap of the progress there, then talk about what changes we were making for the second patient, which we're hoping to do an implant in the next week or so. And this is for our first product, which is called Levathy, which enables you to control a computer or a phone just by thinking. So let's in fact,
so we'll start off with just some introductions. Do you start? Hi?
Everyone, My name is DJ sull I'm an electrical engineer and a chip designer by training. I led the design of first several generations of the Neuralink implant. Currently I was on the founding team and currently a president.
I'm Matthew McDougal.
I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and a head of neurosurgery at Neuralink.
Yeah go ahead, yeah, head of burning the first as applications.
And I'm plussed some software engineer at Nerlink trying to figure out how to turn brain activity into the stuff in the work.
All right, thank you, Well, so let's see, so we'll just get going into the presentation. So our first product is something like I said, we call telepathy, which enables the person with the neural link implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking. And once you can control your phone and computer, you can essentially control almost anything just and literally just by thinking. So there's no eye tracking or anything. It is purely purely your thoughts.
So this is really quite quite a profound device that can help a lot of people who have lost the connection between their brain and body. So imagine people like Stephen Hawking who you know. You imagine if if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who had
still had the connection to their brain and body. So it's it's really uh something that can help millions of people around the world, and it's a it's part of our overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection between the brain and and your and and the rest of the world and your computers. The long term goal, which sounds a little esoteric, is to mitigate the the risk of of the civil civilizational risk of AI by having a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and
digital intelligence. But but that that that will take many years. Uh. Along the way, We're we're going to help solve a lot of brain injury or spinal injury issues. Uh so uh and with without first product sypathy, that's that's going to be really quite profound. Uh that there is also
potential long term for bridging the gaps. So if there are damaged or severed neurons, being able to span the gap between the brain's motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to use their body again, I think that would be very exciting, and it's you know that that is something that is possible in the long term and
they're not. Our second product, which we've demonstrated to work with monkeys, is blind sight, which would enable someone who is completely blind, lost both eyes or completely lost that are optic nerve to be able to see. So that's that's something that we hope to demonstrate in the future. So this just gives you a sense of what the device is. A way to think about the neuralink device is kind of like a fitbit or an Apple watch
with tiny wires or electrodes. Those those tiny wires are implanted in the in the brain and they are read and write electrical signals. So a lot of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing. It's it is mysterious a lot of ways, but but it is. Actually it does operate with like electrical signals, so if you can read and write those electrical signals, you can interface with the brain. And the device is sized so that it is the same size as the as the piece
of skull that is removed. So if it's like a few centimeters diameter of skull skull that's removed, we replace that with the device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot, and that enables read write capability to the neurons completely wirelessly. Yeah, yes, exactly, it's completely wirelessly. So like I could I could have a neuralank right now. You wouldn't know. And it charges inductively so you could just uh it's they have electromagnetic ad that that you
charge the device with. So yeah, it's like an Apple Watch exactly.
So uh, except that it's actually a much harder technical challenge to solve that there's limit as to how much get the print issue or whereas in for phones and.
Really care if you're sitting on the table.
Yeah. Also it's got to go through skin and stuff as well. And okay, so it is a tougher challenge to to charge and to have vivemand with communications, given that has got to go through skin and hair and stuff we have we have solved. So yeah.
Yeah, So our first step with the telepathy is basically to unlock digital independence for people with policies and to allow them to control the computer just with their mind without moving their body. And our goal is to provide them the same level of control, functionality, and reliability that I have when I'm using a computer, even better than the level of control I have.
Just to be clear, this guy he's controlling us with his brain. So he's not like you can't see his hands in this video, but he's not using a mouse and keyboard, just thinking about how to move the cursor and playing civilizations.
No eye trackers from meat, just thinking.
Just a couple of days a cursor move here.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like the last standard two nights ago.
Yes, yeah, I think I think the way he also described that is he's using them.
Yeah, there's many more videos on his on the platform. Definitely checked them out. Yeah, so he can he's string with that live and also can talk and like move his head with that problem multi time.
Yeah, you guys, like, if you join his livestream, you can ask him questions. You'll he'll tell you all about what it's like to move.
Also, I think I haven't played Civilization myself, but I think this is actually not easy.
About this is expert Emperor mode.
Emperor if you have played stiff empro mote is like the highest difficulty level. Just the point is that this is a kind of demanding task. And while wife streaming playing the hardest motive team and he's able to do that while.
Moving on talking engaging with you know, the audience.
Playing One of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess. I think it gets lost sometimes that he's actually playing speed chess against me, which requires an incredibly high fidelity degree of control and speed of control in order to be able to win.
So also, another cool stuff about about our device is that is it anywhere anytime, also on a plane during a flight, while sating really cool memes of care. And also our device unlocks things that previously were impossible for participants. For example, we're able to connect him to his living consoles, which they marcott with friends and family, and it was lovely to see them playing together after years that he couldn't do it since his injury.
I know, if you're sitting over from this guy playing look over, he's going a cap me love, no hands, no movement.
Even away over.
Yeah, it's strange, strange time.
Yeah.
And he loves using the device and using independently daily to watch videos and read play games using the baser. And the key metrics that week are is to make sure our device is actually useful to basically the amount of hours and use the device daily and weekly, and we track it weekly since the since the surgery, and on weeks that he's not too busy and not traveling, he can even reach seventy hours of using the.
Device a week.
This is amazing and he would of course love to use it more, but need to run result sessions, he needs to sleep sometimes and also of course to charge the device once in a while hopefully will improve that over time.
Maybe not obvious to people who are watching this like it's a normal math book. He's controlling. This isn't like some limited addition thing. But there's only a few options, Like you can just do anything that you can do on a mapbook pro that same one I have on my desk. Actually it's the exact same one.
Yeah, And another interesting point is that on the first day he used bciurn Control, was able to break the previous world record for curser control just by using the brain and recently he even doubled it and was able to outperform about ten percent of our engineer at New Link. And you can be sure that we are very good in this game and very quick. And if you want to check out how well how well you can do it, you can do it on our website. And it's very
addictive games. Yeah, it's a very simple game. You just have to click on the square.
But it's actually even though it sounds silly, it's it's quite a Yeah, it can be quite a It sounds like it could be quite addictive, and it's especially if you get a low score and you think there's no way I got it. So, I mean, anyone who wants to try this, I recommend going to the neuralink dot com its website and seeing seeing if you can beat Nolan's record, and it's that you will find that's actually
quite difficult to do so. And this is really with version one of the device and with only a small percentage of the electrodes that are working. So this is this is really just the beginning, but even the beginning is twice as good as the world record. This is important to emphasize the you know, the media has a habit of saying that the glasses ten percent empty, but
actually it's ninety percent full. So I think it's really quite accomplishment of the Neuralink team to have achieved with with the first patient, first device, twice the world record for the range computer madwidth. That's really an astonishing, an amazingly great outcome, and it's only going to get better from here. So the potential is to ultimately get I think to megabit level. So that's that's probably the long term goal of improving the bandwidth of the brain computer interface.
If you think about like how low the bandwidth normally is between a human and advice, it's the average bandwidth is extremely low. It's it's i say, less than one bit per second over the course of a day. If there are eighty six thousand, four hundred seconds in a day, you're outputting less than that number of bets to any any given device except perhaps very rare circumstances. So this is it's actually quite important for for AI. You know, basic for human AI sebiosis is just being able to
communicate at a speed. Yeah, I can follow.
So yeah, just to emphasize again, he's performing at this extremely high level with about fifteen percent of his channels functional, and so we want to mitigate any of the problems that led to that situation. So, you know, the brain is a fascinating organ. I'll share with you some of the secrets about the brain. During any typical brain surgery, a small amount of air is introduced into the skull.
That's because neurosurgeons like to have as much room as possible around the brain, and so there's this little known control mechanism of allowing the CO two concentration in the blood to rise a bit, which allows the brain to either expand or contract, depending on where you you target that CO two. But typically neurosurgeons will have the brain
shrink by lowering CO two. What we're going to do in our future surgeries is keep the CO two concentration actually quite normal, maybe even slightly elevated, and I'll allow the brain to stay its normal size and shape during surgery.
That should eliminate this air pocket that we saw in the first participant that air pocket we think may have contributed to eating up some of the thread slack as the air bubble migrated to be under the implant push the brain away from the implant, and so that's easy enough to fix. Another consideration that we want to focus on for our upcoming participants is that the brain. Think
of it like a really complex folded onion. It's layer upon layer of sheets of neurons all over the surface of the brain, folded into this odd looking shape.
The folds of.
The brain traveled down deep into the brain, and along with it go those onion layers of neurons. And if we insert very close to one of the folds where there may be very useful information encoded in neurons, we may end up traveling with our threads parallel to some of the layers of neurons that were most interested in
avoiding them Entirely. To avoid that possibility, we're going to insert in our future participants more close to the middle of the apex of the folds, ensuring that we're crossing the layers of interest layer five of the cortex.
I also think that it's important to highlight here those tiny wires that Elon mentioned.
They're fraction of a human hair.
They're very flexible intentionally so because brains constantly moving and you want the electros to be moving with the brain causing less of the scarring. And it's actually impossible for human eurosurgeon, however talented matthew Is to actually maneuver them by so we have a surgical robot that we built that can actually precisely target them in any three dimensional space x, y as well as z with micron level precision while avoiding bascoature so that you don't disrupt and
cause immune response from happening. So we actually have the technology to be able to place them exactly where we want them in three.
Yeah, it's truly amazing to see the surface of the brain after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the first participant, without a drop of blood in sight. It's really quite an achievement.
Yes, something that probably most people don't realize is that the brain appears to be sort of somewhat undifferentiated. So if you look at the cortex, it looks like a whole bunch of folds that were you know, maybe like that. It's not obviously just looking at to take a picture of the brain. That that it's the brain is highly differentiated. That there's you pretty much know exactly where the part of the brain is that controls your right hand and your left hand and your leg and that kind of
thing or vision. It's it's actually quite precisely located. It's not some people like might might think look the brain like, oh, could be it could be anywhere, but actually we it it's it's your brain is highly differentiated, even though it doesn't look it. It's.
Yeah, do you want to describe how we actually were, like how we identify word to drill the quen So.
We can we can put a patient that is considering this implant into an f MRI so a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and ask them to imagine hand movements that you know, because of the spinal cord injury don't happen, but just imagining those hand movements causes these areas of the brain to light up in the fMRI scanner. And so we have a pretty good idea based in in fact, for each individual participant which part their brain is going to,
you know, respond to imagined movements of the hand. And so we can map those imagined movements, much as we all do when moving a mouse to controlling a cursor on a screen, even without the use of a mouse.
Yeah, but I think it's kind of an important point that, like, it's not like your the part of your brain that controls your hand might be anywhere in the cortex. It's this is not the case. It's going to be in a very specific region, and it's going to be extremely common across people. Precision is key too.
Yeah, the left handed right handed in my mind too, Like, if you're right handed, you want.
The fight on the left side.
Let the lotto side to the hand gets your commet.
Yeah, the left side of your brain controls right right.
Yeah, everything's crop.
Another of the risk mitigations we're looking at in the future is that, you know, the implant has a certain size. The depth of the bottom of the implant. It's actually dinner than the average human skull. And so what we want to be able to do is control the size of the gap under the implant, give the threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much slack
as possible. We didn't do this in the first participant because we didn't want to manipulate any of their tissue that we didn't absolutely have to in upcoming implants.
Our plan is to sort.
Of sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant, such that the bottom of the implant travels perfectly flush with the normal contour of the inner side of the skull. That will put the implant closer to the brain. It will eliminate some of the tension on the threads, and we think it will reduce some of the tendency of threads to retract.
And we actually built the tool to do.
Yeah, this is actually this is a very important detail. You really want the inner contraur of the skull to be blushed so that the implant there's there's no the brain doesn't want to pucker up into the into the gap. That's really quite a big deal. So, like like minimizing the air procket and the implant being flushed with the inside contour of the skull are two very important improvements.
The additional benefit here is that, uh, you know, you do see some amount of stick up what we call stick ups, so you might have bumped in the head, but this actually eliminates it even further.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like, really our goal is that that if you run your hand over the top of the skull, you don't feel any any momp, you don't feel any any device, and that even if someone was bold, you wouln't really even notice it. And uh and then from the inner inner contraur of the skull that the brain from physical standpoint, doesn't really notice that there's a divot in the skull because there's no dibit. Okay.
Another aspect of the human brain that you know, obviously differs from any of the animals that we tested in is that the human brain is a lot bigger. And so you may not realize that that means the human brain moves quite a bit more than any of these other smaller brained creatures. And so when we open the skull, we see the brain travel toward and away from the robot about three millimeters in total, as the heart beats
and the breathing takes place. And so that movement, you know, it adds a small challenge for the robot in precisely choosing a depth to insert each thread. It's not an enormous challenge, and we've already upgraded the robot's capabilities to be able to even more precisely target depth in even a very rapidly moving brain with a high amplitude of movement. You may think the most obvious mitigation for threads that pulled out of the brain is to insert them deeper.
We think so too, and so we're going to broaden the range of depths at which we insert threads. So for the very first participant, we had an enormous amount of data from our animal work, and we had very highly optimized our insertion depth to maximize the crossing of the layers of interest in the cortex with the electrodes
that we're recording from. Now that we know retraction is a possibility, we're going to insert at a variety of depths that even in several cases of different amounts of retracting threads, we're going to have electrodes at the proper depth and with the deepest threads be able to track how much retraction has occurred across the surface of the brain from each thread. And so we're going to you know, both have more threads in the right layer and have better data on how much retraction has occurred.
If you're a pc I NERD. You might know that being able to control individual z depth per thread it is not something that most neural interface devices offer. Most neural interface devices are kind of a static, fixed rigid array that you push in and all the lectures are on depth.
Right.
To be able to do this is actually pretty pretty novel part of the robots.
Yeah, the historical approach is to actually pound in a sort of bed of nails with an air hammer into.
The Look it looks crazy that that is, Yeah, just with a with a aumuntic hammer. That's the that's what this is. It sounds come somewhat by braic. This is not what we do, but this is the what's been done before. Is that's literally just hammering and what looks like a better nails with the brain, which actually works. It's astonishing that.
Some people like man like DBS props you're just sticking in by hand.
But those are several several or is a magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you're destroying.
Compared to what we're doing.
But that deep brain simulation stuff does actually work and it actually helps people a lot. Yeah, Yeah, that's a great product. Yeah, I mean I think we'll be able to do a much more finessed version of that down
the road. So I mean it's really difficult. Like the neuraling device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to the brain, absolutely minimizes the load on the patient, and the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal life that you won't even notice that someone even has the device. So, like I said, restoring the ability to control your computer and phone, that's a telepathy. And then next device being able to allow people to see
that could not see before. In fact, you could allow people to see kind of like Doorty of the Forge and Star Trek in any whatever. Yeah, infrared ultraviolet radar are so so I think another way of saying is that we want to give people superpowers. So it's not just that we're restoring your prior brain functionality, but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human. That's a super big deal.
And I also think you know, oftentimes the questions that we get a lot is why do you have to actually go into the brain, What if you place it on the surface or most types of score. Basically, the long story short, the physics of how it works, you really need to get the sensors, which are these facing in the brain next to the source, which neuron as
close to it as possible. Otherwise, what you get is you get a population respond and not be able to kind of do the level of controls that we believe of.
Yeah, I mean maybe a good sort of analogy would be like if you're trying to understand what goes on in a factory, you kind of need to go into the factory. You can't just put a death scope on the wall and try to figure out what's going like anything on the outside of the Trying to read things from the outside is like putting a statoscope on the world of a factory trying to understand what's going in the factory. It's not going to be effective. You've got
to be the threads. You gotta be in there. So but I just want to be emphasized again, like the goal is to give people superpowers, not just to restore prior functionality. So I think that's very exciting and I think that should give hope to a lot of people in the world that the future is going to be exciting and inspiring and the technology is going to give them superpowers. I mean, that's that's amazing. Oh yeah, I
guess yeah, and could can you multitest? But that Yeah, In fact, if you look at Nolan's streaming and you can just check out Nolan's streams on on the x platform, he's multitasking all the time. So he's playing video games while talking and uh the podcast podcast. Yeah, yeah exactly. So it's truly just like if you're using your hands and you can be you know, playing a video game while talking.
So and we don't take our word for it, they just go watch. I mean, yeah, he's out there on the internet doing the thing.
Yeah exactly. So can you do keyboards shortcuts or is it just the mouse?
Yeah, that's what you're working on right now.
Sure, so Godley is walking with the mouse. But we are also exploring recording more dimensions out from the newer activity multiple clicks, so to shortcuts or just able to draw more games games with an xbook controller. But also in the future we're expend we plan to expand to the code text, not just the mouse control, but also allow what participant to type much faster.
And yeah, actually so maybe going back to the discussion of thread attraction, you know, one of the very exciting parts to me about this story is that we're able to do so much with fifteen percent of channels, and you have more channels, what that actually offers you is not just faster and mouse control, because in the motor cortext neurons don't all represent the same thing. So if you're trying to understand, like, you know, what an individual finger is trying to do, you might or might not
have an electro next to it. And the more channels you have in the bringing in, the higher likelihood you have representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand.
And so if you're trying to do something like I'll put texts at a fast rate is something that matters a lot for people who are completely locked in, who cannot speak at all, who are trying to, you know, just say I love you to a loved one in their family, or ask for a glass of water or scratch or whatever, you know, being able to type it a faster ate.
It's extremely important.
And the more fingers you have access to, the higher probability you can do that efficient.
And so yeah, you know, I'm.
Super excited about how high the ceiling is that we can get to as we resolve this tut attraction too.
Yeah, I mean we're kindly at approximately ten ten us per second PA. Great, but ultimately we want to get to a megabit, and I think ultimately whole brain interface, I think, you know, many years from now. I think gigabit level as possible. So that's pretty soonishing now, you know, with there is still version of one of our device. As we mentioned, it's version one with only fifteen percent of the threads working. The current device has sixty four
threads with sixteen electrodes on each thread. Our next device has one hundred and twenty eight threads with eight electrodes per thread. Because as we get more confident about how we're exactly to place the electrode the thread, you need fewer electrodes per thread. So we can, essentially, with the current device without substantial changes, potentially double the band if we are accurate with the placement of the threads, and then our next generation device will have maybe even more channels.
Yeah yeah, so next vice amy four Yeah, three thousand channels, So this will just keep getting better and better, really moving up, I think, and for his magnitude in factors of ten, basically in what kind of ad withth So I think it won't be it won't be all that long before someone with a neural link device can communicate faster than someone who is has a fully functional body. And yeah, so I think, you know, faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioneer.
The esports tournaments are going to be like.
You literally won't be able to speak faster than someone can communicate with a neural link to lepathy device.
It may it may be a very interesting part of this. Basically, we currently connect to stand up inputs to the computer through hous and keyboards. Very soon as we will have a part of bendwith we need to think about new ways to actually the interface for the devices.
Is this something that makes said, yeah, no, that's that's a good point because the the current import devices are centered around human hands. So it's like we've got these you know, little meat sticks that we move and there is a certain rate at which you can move your little move your fingers and and so we've got like the mouse and the keyboard and or the joystick control you know, like Xbox control or something like that. But
you really don't need that. You can actually, you know, you don't, you don't need since you're no longer if you're if you're not trying to use your hands, you don't you actually don't need those conventional uh control mechanisms. And so that's why I like, ultimately I think you'll be able to do conceptual telepathy, like where you can communicate entire concepts uncompressed to someone else within your link or to the computer.
Even today, we have some problems here where like, you know, if you don't feel the mouse clicking under your finger, how do you know it actually happened, Because you know, you're you're seeing it on the screen, but you don't actually feel the mouse click. You don't have appropriate sective feedback of you know, the keys under your fingertips or the track pad on your So there's all sorts of
interesting UAX challenges. How to actually give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing, what the EARTHNK is actually doing.
How we're gonna trying to use.
So wireless.
Yeah, it's bluetooth, just a Bluetooth connection, just like how your normal Apple mouse or like Apple Magic keyboard connects to your computer, same exact thing in fact, in yeah, we can basically have this exposed as an HID interface if we want. HID is just the name of the protocol for like sending bits from a mouse into a computer. Yeah, I can plug into basically anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I think we chose that interface because it's ubiquitous. Yeah, basically any devices are have Bluetooth capabilities. Our long term goal is to actually have our own protocol. You know that is safe and secure, but for now, you know, chosen it for interoperability.
So the question is kind of neuralink should prepare the paralysis in the long term. You know, we can't do that right now. We have done sort of preliminary work planting a second neuralink in the spinal cord, and we can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal models. But this isn't something that is you know, don't don't hold your breath waiting for it. It's going to be a while. We've got a lot of work to do.
But yes, there's no reason in theory that we can't repair paralysis.
Yeah, I mean, essentially to to, I mean, there's there's no there's no physics barrier to fully solving paralysis. That is perhaps a way to say that you've got signals coming from your motor cortex. Uh that if they are transferred past the point where the nose are damaged. Essentially just it's basically a communications bridge to bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the point in the necrospine where the nose are damaged. And you should like it
is physics. It is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body functionality. For physics standpoints, it's a very hard technical problem, but there is nothing that it prevents it happening from a physics standpoint. So in terms of next phases roll out, well, we really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between
each neuralink patient. So this is we're only just moving now to our second neuralink patient, but we hope to have you know, if things go well, high single digits this year, and I don't know, maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much technical progress we make, but within a few years hopefully thousands.
Yeah, And I think one thing that is important to highlight is that you know, it's not that we built only one device and one surgery.
We've built bunderds of surgery.
We've built thousands and thousands of devices even for just the ability to unearth any sort of low frequency failure mode. So we have already been investing very heavily in infrastructure to be able to scale this thing on the device manufacturing side as well as on the surgery side of things. We want to be able to help as many people as quickly as well. Yeah, we go through obviously the appropriate hurdles, right that are regulatory.
Challenges and proving out the device with one part.
Yeah, and the device implantation really needs to become almost entirely, if not entirely automatic, in the same way that's a laser eye surgery is done. You know, you don't have an ophthalmologist with a a cutter by hand, that that would be crazy. But the uphomologist oversees the lasic machine and make sure that the settings are correct, and then the machine does everything and restores your eyesight. It's really remarkable how many people have had their eyesight restored with laser.
And I think there's an one could smile, it's they keep making it better. We need to have something similar for a neuralink implantation, so that you basically sit down and whatever the whatever kind of upgrades or you know, brain fixes are needed. That's reviewed by medical expert. Obviously, want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly, but it really needs to be automatic. So you sit down and within ten minutes you have a neuralin device installed,
very very fast. I mean it's very sort of cyberpunk, you know diosex if you played those.
Games, and we'll annually start to interface with adult devices like wheelchair. It's a great question. We're currently focusing on john in computers unlock independence in the virtual world. Of course, our plan is as you mentioned earlier, body arm and a wheelchair to unlock independence in the physical world because, of course at the additional risk if you make your computer. They shouts to that, but we're welcome with the FDA to allow us to quite so, what.
Seems like if the wheelchair has an app, well, the wheelchair just needs to have an airpace, So if the wheelchair has a ge tooth interface, you could just go tooth interface to the wheelchair and.
That's probably something we should do. We're working on pretty soon.
Paperwork it safely you don't drive off.
Well, I think, well we can limit the speed it doesn't go careating often the disaster. But you know, so just make it go slowly at first. But yeah, so being to sort of it, really, the Nework device just should work generally for anything that's got a bluetooth their.
Face, including potentially an optimism.
Yes, yeah, you yes, you could communicate with optimists. Uh, yep, absolutely optimists. Well we also also be able to talk to optimists, but like, but you could just yeah, instead of talking, just you could just be in it directly. Or if if someone has lost the use of speech,
then then they can still communicate to an optimist. They can humunicate telepathically to optimists or Bluetooth and and and so even if someone has completely lost the ability to speak, they could still control optimists or their computer or phone.
We also like, if you have an optimist and you have a NERD, you can just directly map the signal to control of the physical arm of the robot. And that's a very meaningful thing. Like if you're you know, folks that have buncod injury, one of the biggest requests to be able to scratch yourself. It's something that quite annoying actually, And if you have a scratch on your face, you can't fall asleep until you scratch it. You know, it's very convenient to be able to move something physically
towards you to scratch. Similar things like eating food. You know, if you need somebody to feed, you very hard to have dinner with friends in a way that is, you know, sort of a normal social experience. And so if you can feed yourself, pick up a fork and actually eat a piece of chicken on your own, yeah, that's a big deal. It prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and other people in your life that you rely on to take care of. It really increases you.
I think an exciting possibility long term also is to say if you take parts of the Optimus Optimius humanoid robot and you combine that with a neural link. Let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs, Well, we could actually attach an Optimist arm or Optimist legs and do a neural link implant so that the motor commands from your brain that goat would goat to your biological arms, now go to your robot arms or robot legs, and again you'd have basically cybernetic superpowers.
Actually, so the lenksy from the neuralink to your hand would probably be something faster than it is just to go to.
Your physical hand.
So you can imagine, like if you're a piano player or I don't know, anything that requires extremely fast hand movements, that you could actually have a pretty imbalanced right hand robotic arm control versus left hand physical hand control.
That's one of them. Yeah, Like I said, it's just kind of a cyberpunk dio sex in the future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your
biological limbs. And it's certainly that we'll have a much you know as particularly as we span to a large number of of of customers or patients for neuralink, the understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because really there isn't a fine, very fine grained understanding of the brain today because it's just the sensors are not good enough. You've got fMRI, which is pretty good, but it's still not as good as actually having I bound with electroids in the brain.
Yeah, I think this is underappreciated as a research tool to move that whole effort forward of really knowing, you know, what the physical substance of human thought is. We don't know to the to the degree that we need to. So neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool.
Yeah, I mean we I think we can ultimately understand and and fix it quite severe psychosis or like if if somebody's got like the if somebody's got like a.
Like a delusion that they have a chip in their brain.
I was wondering if you're gonna mention that one. We just want to be clear if there's only one person with a neural link chip in their brain. So for people out there who think we've put a chip on their brain, would like to assure you or what it's worth, you probably won't believe us, but we did not put each ep in your brain. Okay, So there's actually a remarkable number of people who think we have put a
trip in their brain, but we have not. But in the future, if you would like us to put a trip in your brain, which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain, then we will be able to do so. So there are people that have severeria, schizophrenia, They've got basically things that their brain is malfunctioning in some way, and this
is actually due to really like physical circuitry issues. You can think of the brain as like, really it's a biological computer and if if some of the circuits are crusted, it's gonna you know, it's going to crash. It's or it's gonna have issues that it's not work. But with a neuralin device, we can fix those issues. And you know, give someone who I think has to say serbisica, spraying or psychosis of some kind, allow them to live a normal life. I think that is one of the likely
things in the future. So yeah, I mean, yeah, you can certainly imagine, like I'm sure people have like parents, grandparents who you know, have memory that's not working as well as it used to be. Sometimes they forget who who their grandchildren are or what day it is, and this is something that in your O like device could help fix.
I mean, that's actually one of the personal reasons.
In many way like forms of you're literally losing and then part of your right then.
Which is just a very very.
Go through it.
Yeah, it's really just it's a glitch in the biological computer that is a fixable glitch. Like it's a short circuit.
Essentially, how does the device charge and how long does the charge last. Yeah, So the current version that Nolan has lasts but four to five hours on a charge, and it takes about forty five minutes to charge. The thing we've learned from Nolan is that that's actually one of the main limitters for him using it more. It's actually pretty hard to use a product more than like seventy hours a week.
But that's about what he has used it for in some weeks.
Yeah, seventy hours a week.
Yeah, I mean just for contexts, like you sleep roughly eight hours a night, so that's you know, we're doing better than the bed. Like the bed is fifty six hours a week if you used roughly, and so seventy hours a week uses I challenge you to think about products that you've actually used for that duration.
But that's again some of these points are worth like emphasizing again, like the that Nolan, our first a Neuralink recipient, has used the neuralink device for seventy hours in a week, which is incredible.
You probably won't enjoy that I'm sharing his computer use publicly, but I assure you for productive things only. But actually, so one of the things we've learned is that in the next version of advice, we really need to like double or increase that battery life, and so I think the next version is going to be.
Double actually actually double without without increasing the charge.
Correct in charging time, to double the battery of life, meaning you should get roughly eight hours of use, and.
The goal is to actually get to all they use. So you can just charge, you know, maybe in your.
Sleep, right, sleep and pillow exactly as soon as you've got like sixteen hours of usage, then you basically have twenty four hours of usage because you can charge while you're sleeping.
One other thing that's important I think to call out your is if you're paralyzed, you can't you put the charger over your head yourself, And so it's important to think about like it's not just a duration of better use, but also can you recharge it yourself and dependently, So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that peaceable because then that means that you can
this is what no one does. You can use the device, charge it, use the device, charge it, use the device with out needing anybody to come in and sort of help you with that, which is a big deal if you're trying to play set up until five am at night when your family.
In the way in which he does that is that there is a charge of coil.
That's a bigger you know about this big and we actually put it in the sleeve of a beanie or a beanie and then he wears it and then says with the voice command and.
Charge charge your energize. That's the one you like.
Howard writing work. So so uh yeah, the current device that Nolan has is reading, so it's trying to read his essentially like worst movement from from one one hand. That's also you know, worth pointing out like in the future, like and we're pretty cool to give Nolan the second implant that would allow the other hand to be used and also have higher uh obviously higher to ELECTORID accounts, so then you could play too, essentially play games two had it, because that's not only how you play games.
And but then with with writing, it's really just it's an electrical impulse. Instead of like reading electrical impulses from the neuron to you issue an electrical impulse, which is obviously critical for visions. So vision is writing, which is just traggering electrical impulse in the vision part of the brain.
And that like activates a pixel. So we actually do have this working in monkeys, and we had we've had it working with monkeys for a while now where you can sort of flash a pixel and then you watch where the monkey. Obviously the monkey is like whatever, monkey's a little surprised to see, like, hey, there's a flash here and a flash here, but it's it gets used
to it after a while. But it just you can see that that the pixel is in the right location because the monkey's eyes will dark to that location.
It's not on on the screen, like there's no pixel on the.
Screen, there's no picks on the screen. On the brain. Yeah, just verify that that the that are triggering pixel in the right part of the brain. So you know, the initial resolution for vision will be relatively low, you know, sort of Atario graphics type of thing, but over time it could potentially be better than normal vision.
And then I guess in terms of some additional applications for where writing to the brain can be useful, what are applications. As Bliss mentioned, there is feedback, there's appropriate sceptive feedback, there's a actile feedback.
Especially robot arm if you're trying to grasp a cop right, you need to know about it.
You want to an egg.
It's very much a delicate balance of not just initiating the movement but getting the feedback and controlling it accordingly. So there is some metasensory cord text that's right adjacent to motor cortex that it could be better motor movements.
So any changes in neural growth the devices and so did were don't see any any signs of neural damage, but I and I guess we we have seen some rebound on some of the electrodes, right.
Correct, And then also I mean, I guess, I guess you know. Brain is very plastic, so it's not that plastic. Well, it does diminish quite a bit after each and why.
Throughout throughout childhood, especially when you get to about twenty five, brain really done cooking. Yeah, but there are there is a little bit of damage done with each insertion, but it's a minuscule amount compared to anything else out there, and so it's an easy amount of damage recover from. And it's really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after after the animal is no longer alive, and
looking at them under a microscope. You can't really tell during life that there's been any.
Brain Another way to interpret this question, have the funded changes in neural growth after the device is inserted. One way to interpret that is like the user learning how to use the device, And I think on that side of things, there's been tremendous progress, and he's put in hundreds of hours trying to figure out the best way to use this device because he really thinks that you know, if you can figure this out and you can help
share this knowledge. I mean, he's like on Friday night at eight pm, you know, he's starting a session of like, you know, figuring out himself how to how to push his own performance to the next level. And that's really a unique learning process because there's not many people in the world that had the experience of moving something with the brain, and so there's a lot of nuance to like, Okay, how exactly should I imagine or attempt to move my risk to get the thing to me.
Yeah, he's really dialed that into it.
Also, just a sheer number of hours that he us He's saying even in the past six months, right, Yeah. Anyways, Like I mean, he's using it in his travel, in his plain ride effectively PCI has left the lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean one of the questions is how close we can voting thoughts into text. I mean, right, right now, ask more about moving curse from the screen on a virtual keyboard. But long term, you should be able to really ask my entire words faster than anyone could possibly time.
I'm able to type a little world today correctly, but we're still in the early days.
Making that a pause experience it. I mean, the other things that we're looking at is sign language. Right at the end of the day, it is a movement of and into rights.
Yeah, that's true.
Was the brain trying to naturally push the threads out? I mean this is sort of a universal feature of any implant in the body. The body tries to reject it, and the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight that. And so with artificial hips and with screws and the spine, we've done a really good job of finding biocompacts of AWL materials and techniques to
fix those implants in the body. I mean, past a certain age, it's getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant, you know, knee, some kind of screws in their spine and so we've got this problem pretty well solved. So to answer your question, yes, the body is trying to get rid of any implant, but we can ensure that basically canned.
It's also worth highlighting that the threads have not actually
moved in the past five months. There's there's some still minor movements in terms of like some maybe maybe getting pushed in a little bit, pushed out a little bit, but it's it's more or less very stable and been stable for more And the reason for that is, you know, once you once you do a brain surgery, it takes some time for the tissues to come in and then and then you know, our tissue or the neo membrane to actually come in and then anchor the threads in place.
And once that happens, it has been stable and seen much movement.
That's where the world record performance starts to come in.
Yeah, that was a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, the threads, like it is important that the threads be extremely tiny. If they're extremely tiny, then the brain does not The smaller they are, the less like the brain is to react to them. So that's why you want the thread to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to your aunts.
So on that note, we do plan to actually share some of the you know, the tissue response in detail and some of the later upcoming updates.
Yeah, it is quite a challenging. It's challenging on many fronts to do something like this because you're trying to read and read and write electrical signals, but you need to have the threads themselves need to be electrically isolated and not subject to corrosion in the body. So like the you know, just middle by itself, it's so much sub subject to corrosion or being attacked. So it's it's it's good like in terms of the various coatings and things.
To actually make this electrode work while not actually eroding its performance over time is very difficult. Human body is a very very harsh environment, very harsh envirotment.
It's a bag of salt water with bad sensors, that's elevated temperature that is well regulated. I mean, I'm sure people have experienced dropping their electronic devices in a seawater and in an instant.
Yeah, yeah, so we'll we're better sort of wrap this up soon and if there's like a few few questions. I guess, so a good question. So what about upgrades? So yeah, we we do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time. Just like you wouldn't want like an iPhone one stuck in your brain forever. You know, if you've got an iPhone fifteen, you probably want the iPhone fifteen, not iPhone one. So I think people over time will be able to
upgrade their their new links. We will take the neural link device out and put a new one in. And we we have done this with some of our animals and they're actually in one case we did it with we upgrade our device three times and and uh with a pig.
We did with a monkey as well.
Yes, and he's he's doing finely.
Hit his I think his record the last.
Yeah, with the with an upgrade, still beat him though.
Still beat him.
Yes, this is true. Humans are top of.
The species board right now, pages like eight or.
Something like eight point five bps. Okay, well that's a very high score. I'm not trying to put Patriot down. And also to train a monkey to do that, it's like a whole challenge on it. Something we have like the best animal care team world.
Yeah, I just do want to have size. We we we we do our absolute best to take care of the animals and h when we had like a USDA inspector come through, she said that this was the nicest animal facility she has ever seen in her entire life.
So breakfast.
The monkey orders room service, Yes, yeah, we have monkey room service, which is rare. We're the only ones who offer monkey room service. So we really do everything we can to maximize well for the animals. So all right with that, thank you everyone for tuning in. I hope you found this interesting.