The Monkey Order's room service. Yeah, we'll won't be all that long before
someone with a neuralink device can communicate faster than someone who has a fully functional
body. And the goal is to give people superpowers. 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 in their brain,
would like to assure you for what it's worth, you probably won't believe
us, but we did not put each other in your brain. Okay,
welcome to Neuralink Live Update. We're going to tell you about the progress of
the first patient with a neuralink ioland 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 Lefathy, 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. DJ, you wants to
hi everyone. My name is d J. Shull' 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 McDougall. I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and a head of neurosurgery at
Neuralink. Yeah, go ahead, a head of burning the first as applications,
and I'm blessed a software engineer at Nerlink trying to figure out how to
turn bern activity into cool stuff. All right, thank you, Well,
so let's see, so we'll just get going into the presentation. So our
first product is sort of like SAP we call a telepathy, which is enables
the person with the Neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking.
And once you can control your phone and computern essentially control almost anything just
and literally just thinking. So there's no eye tracking or anything. It is
purely purely your thoughts. So a this is a 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 h Stephen Hawking, who you know,
I imagine if he 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 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 the rest of the world in 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'll that will take
many years. Along the way, we're going to help solve a lot of
brain injury or spinal injury issues. Uh so uh and with without first product
sympathy, that's that's going to be really quite profound. Uh that there is
also potential long term for bridging the gaps if there are damaged or severe 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 their optic noeve 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. Uh. A way
to think about the neuralink device is kind of like a fobit or an Apple
watch with with tiny wires or electrodes. Those those tiny wires are implanted in
the in the brain and they read and write electrical signals. So a lot
of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing. It's it is mynsterious
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 devices 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 replaced
that with device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot, and that
enables read write capability to the neurons completely wirelessly. YEA, yes, exactly,
it's completely wirelessly. So like I could. I could have a neural
ink right now, you wouldn't know, and it charges inductively, so you
could just basically have an electromagnetic add that 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 heat the brain tissue whereason for phones and really care sitting on the
people. Yeah, so so it's got to go through skin and stuff as
well. And okay, so it's it is a tougher challenge to to charge
and to have iband with communications given that it's got to go through skin inherent
stuff we have we have yeah, so yeah, yeah, So our first
step with the Telepaphy is basically to unlock digital independence for people with prolysies 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
been following, that's with his brain, so he's not like you can't see
his hands in this video, but he's not using a loss and keyboard thinking
about how to move the cursor and time Civilizations. No eye tracker, right,
there's no I tracking from just thinking like 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 it
is. Yeah, he is many more videos on his the platform. Definitely
checked them out. Yeah, so you can he's string that live and also
can talk and like movies had with that. Yeah, you guys, like,
if you join this live stream, you can ask him questions. You'll
you'll tell you all about what it's like to right. Also, I think
I haven't played Civilization myself, but I think this is actually not easy.
But this is expert Emperor mode. Emperor mode if you have played stiff ePRO
mode is like the highest. Just the point is that this is a kind
of way demanding task and while live streaming playing the hardest movie game, and
he's able to do that while movie talking, engaging with the audience. One
of the other games he likes to play a lot of chess. I think
it gets lost sometimes that he's actually playing speed chess against me, which requires
an incredibly high fidelitygree of control and speed of control in order to be able
to win. Also another cool stuff about our devices that use it anywhere anytime,
also on a plane during a flight while reading really cool memes of care.
Also, our device unlocks things that previously were impassible for our participants.
For example, we're able to connect him to his living consoles which play Marricat
with friends and family, and it was lovely to see them playing together after
years that couldn't do it since he's injury. I know if you're sitting over
from this guy playing look over in a cat meme, not no hands,
no movement even away over. Yeah, it's change strange time. Yeah.
And he loves playing using the device and using independently daily to watch videos and
read play games using the baser. And the key metrics that we care is
to make sure our device is actually useful to basically the amount of hours to
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 using the device a week. This is amazing
and he would of course left 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. I think
maybe not obvious to people who are watching this, like it's a normal map
book he's controlling. This isn't like some limited thing that there's only a few
options. You can just do anything that you can go on. Man,
the same one I have on my desk. Actually it's the exact same one.
And maybe another interesting point is that on the first day he used BCI
control, he 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 week 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 it's
a very simple game. You just have to click on the square. But
it's it's it's it's actually, even though it sounds silly, it's it's quite
a Yeah, it can be quite It sounds like it'd 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, any anyone who wants to try this,
I recommend going to the neural link dot com 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 that are working.
So this is uh, this is really just the beginning, but even the
beginning is twice as good as the world record. This is important to size
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 Neuraling team to have achieved with the first patient, first
device, twice the world record for the brained 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 partly 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 a device, 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 undred seconds in a
day, you're outputting less than that number of bets to any any given device
except half very rare circumstances. So this is it's actually quite important for AI.
You know, basic for human AI sembiosis is just being able to communicate
at a speed. Yeah, I could 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. 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 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 cortex. I also think that it's important to highlight here those
tiny wires that Elon mentioned, their their fraction of a human hair. They're
very flexible intentionally so because you know, brain is 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 see with micronic 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 in Yeah, it was 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,
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 where you know, maybe like that it's it's it's not
obviously just looking at to take a picture of the brain that uh 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 that kind of thing or 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 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 all the queen? 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. So we have a pretty good idea based in fact, for each
individual participant, which part of 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 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 keyt
Yeah, so the left handed right handed, to my mind, like,
if you're right handed, you want the fights on the left side, the
lato side to it. Yeah, the left side of your brain controls right
side of 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 is actually thinner 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 implants 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, will eliminate some
of the tension on the threads. We think it will reduce some of the
tendency of threads to retract. Right, And we actually built a tool to
do right. Yeah, this is actually this is a very important detail.
You really want the the inner contur with the skull to be blush, so
that so 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
minimize 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 momp, you don't feel any device, and
that even if someone was bold, you want to really even notice it.
And then from the inner inner contra 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 dib
it. 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 robots 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 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 the depth or thread it's not
something that most neural interface devices offer. Most neural inface devices are kind of
the static fixed Rigi array that you push in and all the letters 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 plant. Looks
it looks crazy that that is, yeah, just with a with a aumount
of camera. That's that's it sounds come somewhat by byric. This is not
what we do, but this is the wat's been done before. Is that's
literally just hammering and what looks like a better nails with the brain actually works.
It's astonishing that it actually some people like DBS props you're just sticking in
by hand. Those are several several orders of 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 point. 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. They 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 slapathy.
And then next device being able to allow people to see that could not see
before. In fact you could, you could allow people to see kind of
like Jordan of the Forge and Star Trek in any whatever infrared, ultraviolet radar.
So so, so I think another way of saying it 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 all sides
of school 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 Otherwise what you get
is you get a population respault and not be able to kind of do the
level of controls that we believe. 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 us death scope on the wall and try to figure ot what's going like
anything on the outside of the Trying to read things from the outside is like
putting a statoscope on the wall of a factory trying to understand what's going in
the factory. It's not going to be effective. You've got to be threads.
I got to be in there. So but I just want to be
emphasized again, like the goal is to give people superpowers, not not just
to restore prior functionality. So I think it'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. Yeah, and could can you multitask
with it? 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 podcast the
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 I mean, don't take a word for it. They just
go watch. Yeah, he's out there on the internet doing the thing.
Yeah exactly. So can you do keyboard shortcuts or is just a mouse?
Yeah, that's actually we're working on right now. Oh sure, so Courtley
is walking the mouse, but we are also exploring more dimensions out from the
new activity multiple clicks, so shortcuts or able to do more games games with
an ex boot controller. But also in the future we'll expand. We plan
to expand to the code text, not just the mouse control, but also
allow we'll put the spend too. I put much fast to it. Yeah,
actually, so maybe going back to the discussion of third attraction, you
know, one of the very exciting parts to me about the story is that
we're able to do so much with fifteen percent of channels. 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 brain, 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's 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 love one in their family or ask for a glass of water or scratch
or whatever, you know, being able to type it a faster it's extremely
important. And the more fingers you have access to, higher probability you can
do that official And so yeah, you know, I'm super excited about how
high the ceiling is. Can we can get to as we solve this dead
attraction too. Yeah, I mean we're currently at approximately ten tenus per second
p great, but ultimately we want to get to megabit and I think,
say ultimately the 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 with the placement of the threads, and then our next generation device
will have maybe even more channels. Yeah yeah, so next advice to airing
for yeah, three thousand channels. So this will just keep getting better and
better, really moving up. I think and for as magnitude in factors of
ten, basically in what kind of dwidth. So I think it won't be
it won't be all that long before someone with a neuralink 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
startup inputs to the computer to hours and keyboards. Very soon as we will
have a part of then we need to think about new ways to actually build
the interface for devices. Yeah no, that's that's a good point because the
you can't input devices are centered around human hands. So it's like we've got
these you know, little meat sticks that we move and there's 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 doystick control, you know,
like Xbox control or something like that. But you really don't need that.
You can actually you don't. 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 it 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. We're 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. You don't have the
appropriate acceptive feedback of you know, the keys under your fingertips or the trackpad
on your So there's all sorts of interesting UX challenges to actually give the user
some sense of what their decoder is actually doing, or what the earth is
actually doing they're so wireless. Yeah, it's Bluetooth, just a bluetoth 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 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 that
is safe and secure, but for now chosen it for interoperability. So the
question is kind of neuralink to prepare 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. 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 pers 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 neves
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 a physic standpoint, 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 of 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 if this is so somewhat
dependent on regulatory approval and how 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 bunters 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 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 Yeah, we go through obviously the appropriate hurdles that are regulatory
challenges. 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 optomologist with a laser cutter by
hand, that that would be crazy, But the optomologist oversees the a laser
machine and make sure that the settings are correct, and then the machine does
everything and restores your eyesight. That's really remarkable how many people have had their
eyesight restored with laser And I think there's another one called smile. It's they
keep making it better. We need to have something similar for a neuralin implantation,
so that you basically sit down and whatever the whatever kind of upgrades or
you know, brain fixes are needed. That's that's reviewed by medical expert.
Obviously, we 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 neural device installed, very very fast. I mean it's very sort
of cyberpunk, you know diosex if you played those games and will annually to
interface with adult devices like wheelchair. It's a great question. We're currently focusing
on turning computers unlock independence in the virtual world. Of course, our plan
is as you mentioned, little body and wheelchair to knock independence. Physical world
is of course at additional risk if you make computer yeahs to that, but
we're welcome with the FDA to allow us to what seems like if the wheelchair
has an app, well the wheelchair just needs to have an airface. So
if wheelchair has a Bluetooth interface, you could just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair
and that's probably something we should do. We're working on pretty soon paperwork safely.
You don't, Well, I think, well, we can limit the
speed so it doesn't go careating an authentic disaster, but you know, so
just it go slowly at first. But yeah, so being able to sort
of it. Really, the New York device just should work generally for anything
that's got a Bluetooth theraterface, including potentially an optimism. Yes, yeah,
yes, you could communicate with optimists. Yep, absolutely optimist. 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 mumunicate 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 nerve, and you can just
mapped the insignal to control of the physical armor, and that's a very meaningful
thing, like if you're no Folks that have spon ecoan 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 too. 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 sort of a normal social experience. And so
if you can feed yourself, pick up a fork and actually eat a pizza
chicken on your own, yeah, that's a big deal. It prevents and
saves a lot of interaction 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
optimous 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
optimus armor optimist legs and do a neuralink 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 linksy from the neuralink to your hand would probably be faster than
it is to go to your physical hands. So you can imagine, like
if you're a piano player or 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 expand to a large number 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 aren't good enough. You've got fMRI, which is pretty
good, but it's still not as good as actually having I bound with like
TOIDs 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. Neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool. Yeah, I
mean we I think we can ultimately understand and and fix it's 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 if you're going
to mention that one. We just want to be clear if there's only one
person with a new link hip in their brain. So for people out there
who think we've put a chip in their brain, would like to assure you
or what it's worth, you probably won't believe us, but we did not
put each op in your brain. Okay, it's 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 tip in your brain, then we will be able
to do so. So there are people that have severia, 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 crussed, 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 neuralic device,
we can fix those issues. And you know, give someone who I think
has to say severe scisophraina 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 have you 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 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 part of your right
then, yeah, just a very verat Yeah, and it's really just it's
a glitch in the biological computer that is a fixable glitch, like 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 it in some weeks. Yeah, seventy hours a week.
Yeah, I mean just for context, like you sleep roughly eight hours
of night, so that's you know, we're doing better than the bed,
Like the bed is fifty six hours a week he used, So seventy hours
a week of uses. I challenge you to think about products you've actually used
for that duration. That's again, some of these points are worth like empasizing
again, like the that's Nolan, our first on yourlink recipient has used the
uralin 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 mean I assure
you for productive things only. But actually, so one of things we've learned
is that in the next version of the device, who really need to like
double or increase that out of your life, And so I think DJ the
next version is going to be double actually actually do without without increasing the charge
correct in charging time to double, the better your 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 sleeping 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 here 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 independently.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them peaceable because then
that means that you can and this is what no one does. You can
use the device, charge it, use the device, charge it, use
the device without needing anybody to come in and sort of help you with that,
which is a big deal. If you're trying to play save until five
am at night when your family's And the way in which he does that is
that there is a charge of coil. That's a bigger you know about this,
and we actually put it in the sleeve of a little 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. Uh 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
Alost you know, with Worth pointing out like in the future, like we're
pretty cool to give Nolan a second implant that would allow the other hand to
be used and also have higher uh obviously higher active electro accounts, so then
you could play too, essentially play games two handed, because that's not only
how you play games and uh but then with with writing, it's really just,
uh, it's an electrical impulse. Instead of like reading electrical impulses from
the neurons, you issue an electrical impulse, which is obviously critical for vision.
So vision is writing, which is just triggering 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 have 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. Mike's a
little surprised to see, like, hey, there's a flash here and a
flash here, but it's it's 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 will dart to that location. It's not on the screen,
like there's no pixel on the screen, there's no picks on the screen in
the brain. Yeah, just like just verify that that there 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 a Tario 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 receptive feedback, there's a tel feedback, especially on robot
army. You're trying to grasp ap you need to know about it to some
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 cortex that's
right adjacent to modern cort text it could be better motor movements. So any
changes in neural growth after the device is inserted, we don't see any any
signs of neural damage, but I and I guess we we have seen some
rebound on some 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 diminished quite a bit after and why
through throughout childhood, especially when you get to about twenty five brain really done
cooking. Yeah, but that there 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 to recover from.
And it's really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after after the animal
is no longer live 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 fund need changes in neural growth after device is inserted. One
way to interpret that is like the user learning how to use the device.
I think on that side of things, there's been tremendous progress. 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 he 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 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 too. Yeah, he's really dialed
that into it. Also, just a sheer number of hours that he's us
He's saying even in the past six months, right, Yeah, in many
ways, like he's using it in his travel, in his plane ride.
Effectively, PCI has left alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean
one of the questions is how close we can burning thoughts out of text.
I mean, right, right now, it's more about and curse from the
screen on a virtual keyboard. But long term you should be able to really
master about entire words faster than anyone could possibly time. I'm able to type
a low world today directly, but we're still in the early days making that
a pause experience. I mean, the other things that we're looking at is
silent. At the end of the day, it is a movement of and
into rights. Yeah. 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 in the spine, we've done a really good job of
finding biocompatible 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, the uh, 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 sure 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 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 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. 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 unts. So on that note, we do plan to actually share some
of the tissue response in detail in 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 is somewhat supress subject to corrosion or being attacked. So it's it's it's
good. Like in terms of the pre various coatings and things. To actually
make this electrode work while not actually eroding its performance over time is very difficult.
Human bodies are very very harsh, very harsh. It's a bag of
salt water with bad sensors, that's elevated temperature that as 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 a few last 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
their 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 the iPhone one. So I think
people over time will be able to upgrade their neural links. So we'll take
the neural link device out and put a new one in. And we have
done this with some of our animals, and they're actually in one case we
did with we upgradeed device three times and and uh with a pig. We
did with a monkey as well. Yes, and he's he's doing fine.
Point hit his I think his record with an upgrade. It still beat him
though, still beat him. Yes, this is true. Humans are top
of the species board right now. Pages like what like eight or something.
It was like eight point five bps. Okay, well that's a very high
school not trying to put Patriot down. And also to train a monkey to
do that is a full challenge on its own. 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 uh, 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. Yeah, we have monkey
room servants, which is rare fact. We're the only ones who offer monkey
room servants. 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're