The Real Cyborg

 

San Francisco based Neurotechnology Company, Neuralink is in news of every corner of the world from 2020, due to its Brain Chip topic. This is really a cyborg type of thing, it's the kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires. This Company, wants to attach our brainpowers to computers and you can’t imagine that, they showed off a device reading a pig's brain signals in real time.

 

Elon Musk, one of the richest persons in the world, is the owner of this Neuralink Company, from this time he unveiling a new brain computer interface it's called the Link. Musk says that one day, its Link could cure everything of human illness from paralysis to blindness. Our brains are made up of millions of millions neurons cells with long spindly arms that send messages by electrical spikes, those spikes and electricity travel between neurons in a chain reaction sending messages to the parts of our brain that control speech or movement.

According to company, brain cells are kind of like electrical wiring and rather than just having neurons sending electrical signals those signals could be sent and received by a chip.

Neuralink's presents its implantable brain chip named “the Link Version 0.9”, it's a brain computer interface aimed to be implanted straight into the brain by a surgical robot in a single day or may be in few hours surgery without a big incision or general anesthesia, remove only about a coin sized piece of skull and then you can just walk around right afterwards. Its looks pretty cool that the chip plugs into your brain directly by a tiny microscopic threads and they connect with the neurons in your brain to receive and send electrical signals. Company says these electrodes won't damage your brain if they're inserted very carefully. Regarding, its cost on surgery, company’s boss says that it'll hopefully eventually only cost a couple of thousand dollars; he wants it to be about as expensive as laser eye surgery.

Neuralink did an experience and brought out three live pigs, one pig without a brain implant, second, who'd a link implanted and then it removed without any issues and a third pig that had a chip in it for two months. This demo by the company sees a live reading of the neurons in the pig's brain firing in real time, specifically, the neurons that were sending and receiving messages from her snout. Scientists hearing real-time signals from the neural link in a third pig’s head, so this neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout. Whenever that implanted pig snuffles around and touches something with a snout, which sends out neural spikes which are detected. Scientists also saw the chip predicting the pig's movements based on brain activity which shows the electrodes firing and stimulating neurons and lighting up different brain regions. Neuralink's head neurosurgeon Mr Matthew Mcdougall said that the first trials of their device would be aimed at treating things like paraplegia (paralysis of lower half body).

 

So, I can imagine that the world future's going to be weird with a lot of these types of ideas but we didn't get any concrete timelines or really any idea of how they'd actually work. So, we can says that company’s product “Link” could be amazing for treating things like spinal or other serious types of injuries, but don't expect this to turn them into the cyborg any time.