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full screen Elon Musks has gone out on X and said that the first human has had a chip implanted. Archive image. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/TT
The first human has now had a chip from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink implanted in his brain. Musk announces it himself on the X platform.
It was in May of last year that Neuralink, after several attempts, got the OK from the American drug agency FDA to test its brain implants on humans.
In a post on X, Elon Musk writes that the patient is doing well and that they have been able to record signals from certain nerve cells in the brain. The goal of the first pilot study is to investigate safety, and those who receive the implant should be able to control a keyboard or a pointer on a screen just by thinking. In the long term, the company has said that the idea is to help paralyzed patients to be able to move.
64 electrodes
The implant is described as a coin-shaped chip and was operated on by a robot. 64 hair-thin electrodes exit the chip and enter the cerebral cortex.
Jens Schouenborg, professor of neurophysiology at Lund University, has conducted research in the field for many years. Together with his research group and Neuronano AB, he has developed a new technique for therapeutic brain stimulation. They hope to begin testing the technology on humans in less than a year.
He thinks it is positive that Elon Musk is paying attention to the research field, but finds it difficult to say anything specific about what has now been communicated from Neuralink because the information provided by the company is sparse.
– It has been an extremely short time (one day) after the implantation was done. The big challenge is to get stable registrations over a long period of time. This is due, among other things, to the fact that the brain can move inside the skull, which can cause an unstable electrode position in the brain, he says.
Criticism of animal testing
The first product from Neuralink will be called Telepathy, writes Elon Musk on X.
A video published in 2021 shows a monkey playing a computer game just by thinking. Musk himself has said that no animals have died during the experiments, but there has also been strong criticism that there have been unnecessarily many and unethical animal experiments.
FACTS Electrodes in the brain
The brain is made up of tens of billions of neurons, which communicate through chemical signaling substances. When this happens, a weak current pulse occurs, which can be detected by an electrode.
The smaller the electrodes, the less risk there is of it damaging or affecting surrounding tissue.
The electrodes can be used both to record the activity in the brain and to influence it by sending in signals. This may involve the treatment of, for example, Parkinson’s disease and severe pain and epilepsy.
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