**Reading Brain Activity**

We've shown you a demonstration of reading brain activity, where each dot represents a neural spike and the blue chart at the bottom shows an accumulation of neural spikes in that region. This technology allows us to read brain activity with high accuracy. We've used this technology to predict the position of joints in animals, including pigs on treadmills. By analyzing the neural signals, we can accurately predict the movement of the joints. This has significant implications for understanding how the brain controls movement and could potentially be used to treat paralysis or other motor disorders.

**Neural Implants**

Our team is working on developing neural implants that can read and write neural activity with high precision. These implants use advanced technology to detect neural signals and translate them into digital data. We're using two-photon microscopy to analyze the stimulated neurons in real-time, which allows us to see how the brain responds to different types of stimulation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of neurological disorders, including paralysis and other motor disorders.

**Clinical Trials**

We've recently received a Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA for our neural implant technology. This designation recognizes the potential of our device to treat a serious or rare disease and allows us to accelerate its development and review process. Our first clinical trial is aimed at people with paraplegia or tetraplegia, who have suffered spinal cord injuries that have left them with limited or no control over their limbs. We're planning to enroll a small number of patients in this trial to test the safety and efficacy of our device.

**Long-Term Applications**

If successful, our technology could potentially be used to restore full-body motion to people with paralysis. This would involve implanting a neural shunt at the base of the spine or elsewhere in the body, which would allow us to read and write neural activity more accurately than ever before. We're excited about the potential for this technology to revolutionize the treatment of paralysis and other motor disorders.

**Future Developments**

One question that's come up repeatedly on Twitter is whether our technology will be able to save and replay memories in the future. While we can't yet predict exactly what the future holds, we believe that our technology has the potential to enable new forms of memory storage and retrieval. This could potentially allow us to upload and download memories, or even transfer them from one person's brain to another.

**Cost and Availability**

Another question that's come up is how much it will cost to use our technology when it becomes available. We're optimistic that the cost will be relatively low, potentially in the range of a few thousand dollars per device. However, this will depend on the development and manufacturing process, as well as the number of devices we can produce at scale.

**Automated Surgery**

One aspect of our technology that's likely to contribute to its low cost is automated surgery. We're working on developing advanced algorithms and computer vision systems that can be used to automate surgical procedures, reducing the need for human surgeons and making the process more efficient and less expensive.

**Partnerships with Smartphone Industry**

We're also exploring partnerships with the smartphone industry to use their advanced manufacturing capabilities to produce our devices at scale. We believe that our technology has a lot in common with the components used in smartphones and smartwatches, such as tiny sensors and electrodes. By leveraging this existing infrastructure, we can potentially reduce the cost of production and make our device more widely available.

**Long-Term Potential**

Finally, we're excited about the long-term potential for our technology to revolutionize fields like medicine, education, and entertainment. With the ability to read and write neural activity, we may be able to develop new forms of therapy, diagnosis, and treatment that are currently unimaginable. We're just getting started on this journey, and we can't wait to see where it takes us.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gertry's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are uh in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with this now but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here all right welcome to the neural link product demo i'm really excited to show you what we've got i think it's going to blow your mind um so i want to emphasize the the purpose of neural link like what do we what's our goal our goal is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly seamlessly implanted device so you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head and feel and look totally normal but it solves some important problem in your brain or spine so going into the neural link architecture what we've done over the past year is dramatically simplify the device so we we about a year ago we had a device which had a multiple parts including a piece that it had to sort of sit behind your ear and it was it was it was complex and you and you wouldn't still look totally normal you'd have a thing behind your ear so we've simplified this to simply something that is about the size of a large coin and it goes in your skull replaces a piece of skull and the wires then then connect within a few centimeters or about an inch away from the device and this is sort of what it looks like so this is our little device it does that thing at the bottom is just to hold the threads in place because they're just like little fine wires um i mean frankly to to sort of simplify this uh what what we're i mean it's more complicated than this but it's in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires our current prototype version 0.9 has about a thousand channels uh so that's about 100 times better than the the next best um consumer device that's available and it's a 23 millimeters by eight millimeters it actually uh fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick so it fits it's it goes flush with your skull it's invisible and all you can see afterwards is a tiny scar and if it's under your hair you can't see it at all in fact i could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know all right so it's also inductively charged so it's charged in the same way that you told your charge a smart watch or a phone um and so you can use it all day uh charge it at night and have full functionality so you would really you know it would be completely seamless uh and uh yeah no wires uh in terms of getting a link so that um you need to have the device uh a great device and you also need to have a great robot that puts in the uh the electrodes and does the surgery so you want the surgery to be as automated uh and as possible and the only way you can achieve the level of precision that's needed is with an advanced robot uh the link procedure the the installation of a link done in under an hour so you can basically go in the morning and leave the hospital in the afternoon and it can be done without general anesthesia so this is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do uh essentially the entire surgery uh so in everything from from incision uh removing the the skull inserting the electrodes placing the device um and then closing things up and having you ready to leave so we want to have a fully automated system so this shows you um a sort of close-up view which i think is actually not too gruesome of the electrodes being inserted in the brain and if you look closely you'll see that um that's it's a little counterintuitive that if the electrodes are inserted very carefully that there is no bleeding and so the if you have very tiny electrodes and if they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and make sure to avoid any veins or arteries so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link so does it actually work and what i'm excited to show you um i'll quote like the three little pigs demo um and if our uh animal houses we're bringing out the the pigs and what we're gonna show you is a well i'll walk right over and show you so what we have in pen number one is joyce uh and she does not have an implant obviously healthy and happy we're trying to get go through it out and this is how you know it's a live demo so here's dorothy and in the case of dorothy dorothy used to have an implant and then we removed the implant so this is a very important thing to demonstrate is reversibility so if you if you have a neural link and then you decide you don't want it or you want to get an upgrade and the neural link is removed isn't removed in such a way that you are still healthy and happy afterwards and what dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the neural link remove it and be healthy happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig thanks dorothy here we go great okay great okay this is a high energy pig um all right gertrude thanks for coming out um so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gotri's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here and so on the screen you can see uh each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes and and then if you if she yeah she shuffles around touches this knot in the ground or you kind of feed her some food pigs low food um then you can see the neurons will fire much more than when you're not touching this now and uh that's what's making the beeping sound all right cool so as you can see we have a healthy and happy pig initially shy but obviously high energy and and uh you know kind of loving life and she's had the implant for two months so this is a healthy and happy pig with an implant that is two months old two months old and working well all right cool um and then um we actually have hope this works is so we said well what if we do two neurolink implants and we've been able to do uh dual neural link implants uh in actually i think three pigs at this point and we have a couple of them here um and we're able to show that you can actually have multiple neural links implanted um and again healthy and happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig so um so it's possible to have multiple links in your head and have them all be sending out signals and you're working well all right so we just showed you a demonstration of reading brain activity and let's see probably see that um as i'm saying each of those dots represents a neural spike and the um the blue chart at the bottom is showing an accumulation of neural spikes in that region so uh in in terms of additional uh brain reading activity uh when we have um say um one of our pigs on a treadmill and we're gonna treadmill um it's very funny concept really um and we uh take the readings from the neurons and we try to predict the position position of the joints um and so we say we have the predicted position of the joints and then we we measure the actual position of the joints you can see that they're almost exactly aligned so we're able with a wireless neural neural implant to actually predict the position of of all of the limbs in the pig's body with very high accuracy now in terms of of writing to the brain or stimulating neurons uh we also need precise control of the electric field in space and time we need a wide range of current for different brain regions some some regions require delicate stimulation some require a lot of current and you want obviously no harm to the brain over time um and the way we um by the way we analyze the the stimulated stimulating neurons uh is with a two-photon uh microspicy i always have trouble pronouncing that microscopy um and it's very impressive technology you can actually literally see in real time uh how the neurons are firing so uh the the red sort of things are the neurons red red sort of flashing things are the neurons uh firing or i should say the uh the electrodes firing so the red things are electrodes firing and then the green are the neuron bodies responding to the current from the electrode and we're making good progress towards clinical studies i'm excited to announce that we received a breakthrough device designation from the fda in july thanks to the hard work of the neurolink team so i want to be clear we're working closely with the fda and will will be extremely rigorous in fact we will we will significantly significantly exceed the minimum fda guidelines for uh safety we will make this uh as safe as possible but what are some likely first applications so our first clinical trial is aimed at people with paraplegia or tetraplegia so cervical spinal cord injury we're going to enroll we plan to enroll a small number of patients to make sure the device is safe and that it works in that case uh yeah so actually just to elaborate on that um if somebody is um like a severe spinal cord injury uh you know to agree that they even they have um very limited control even over their facial muscles i think something that's very exciting as a long-term application is if you can if you can sense what somebody's trying to do with their limbs what they want to do with their limbs then you can actually uh do a second implant that's at the base of the spine or wherever just after wherever the spinal injury occurred and you can you can create a neural shunt so we i i think long term i'm confident that long term it will be possible to restore somebody's full-body motion another question from twitter will you be able to save and replay memories in the future uh yes i think in the future you will be able to save and replay memories um i mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode um but uh well i guess they're pretty good predicting um but yeah essentially if you have a whole rain interface everything that's encoded in memory you could you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird uh one common theme that's been coming up a lot on these twitter questions coming in is that of availability and so matthias has a specific question on this which is any estimate of how much it will cost at launch and what price it will reduce to over time well i i think at at launch it's probably going to be it i would say that's not really representative because at first i think it's going to be you know quite expensive but that price will very rapidly drop and i think over time we want to get the the cost um obviously down as low as possible but i think um inclusive of the automated surgery i think we want to get the the price down to a few thousand dollars something like that um and i think that's possible i think it should be possible to get it similar to um lasik and and then the device electronics itself i think will will not be very expensive um because it actually does does use a lot of the parts that are made in extremely high volume in tens of millions of units for smartphones as well as smartwatches and wearables in generalso what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gertry's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are uh in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with this now but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here all right welcome to the neural link product demo i'm really excited to show you what we've got i think it's going to blow your mind um so i want to emphasize the the purpose of neural link like what do we what's our goal our goal is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly seamlessly implanted device so you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head and feel and look totally normal but it solves some important problem in your brain or spine so going into the neural link architecture what we've done over the past year is dramatically simplify the device so we we about a year ago we had a device which had a multiple parts including a piece that it had to sort of sit behind your ear and it was it was it was complex and you and you wouldn't still look totally normal you'd have a thing behind your ear so we've simplified this to simply something that is about the size of a large coin and it goes in your skull replaces a piece of skull and the wires then then connect within a few centimeters or about an inch away from the device and this is sort of what it looks like so this is our little device it does that thing at the bottom is just to hold the threads in place because they're just like little fine wires um i mean frankly to to sort of simplify this uh what what we're i mean it's more complicated than this but it's in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires our current prototype version 0.9 has about a thousand channels uh so that's about 100 times better than the the next best um consumer device that's available and it's a 23 millimeters by eight millimeters it actually uh fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick so it fits it's it goes flush with your skull it's invisible and all you can see afterwards is a tiny scar and if it's under your hair you can't see it at all in fact i could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know all right so it's also inductively charged so it's charged in the same way that you told your charge a smart watch or a phone um and so you can use it all day uh charge it at night and have full functionality so you would really you know it would be completely seamless uh and uh yeah no wires uh in terms of getting a link so that um you need to have the device uh a great device and you also need to have a great robot that puts in the uh the electrodes and does the surgery so you want the surgery to be as automated uh and as possible and the only way you can achieve the level of precision that's needed is with an advanced robot uh the link procedure the the installation of a link done in under an hour so you can basically go in the morning and leave the hospital in the afternoon and it can be done without general anesthesia so this is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do uh essentially the entire surgery uh so in everything from from incision uh removing the the skull inserting the electrodes placing the device um and then closing things up and having you ready to leave so we want to have a fully automated system so this shows you um a sort of close-up view which i think is actually not too gruesome of the electrodes being inserted in the brain and if you look closely you'll see that um that's it's a little counterintuitive that if the electrodes are inserted very carefully that there is no bleeding and so the if you have very tiny electrodes and if they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and make sure to avoid any veins or arteries so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link so does it actually work and what i'm excited to show you um i'll quote like the three little pigs demo um and if our uh animal houses we're bringing out the the pigs and what we're gonna show you is a well i'll walk right over and show you so what we have in pen number one is joyce uh and she does not have an implant obviously healthy and happy we're trying to get go through it out and this is how you know it's a live demo so here's dorothy and in the case of dorothy dorothy used to have an implant and then we removed the implant so this is a very important thing to demonstrate is reversibility so if you if you have a neural link and then you decide you don't want it or you want to get an upgrade and the neural link is removed isn't removed in such a way that you are still healthy and happy afterwards and what dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the neural link remove it and be healthy happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig thanks dorothy here we go great okay great okay this is a high energy pig um all right gertrude thanks for coming out um so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gotri's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here and so on the screen you can see uh each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes and and then if you if she yeah she shuffles around touches this knot in the ground or you kind of feed her some food pigs low food um then you can see the neurons will fire much more than when you're not touching this now and uh that's what's making the beeping sound all right cool so as you can see we have a healthy and happy pig initially shy but obviously high energy and and uh you know kind of loving life and she's had the implant for two months so this is a healthy and happy pig with an implant that is two months old two months old and working well all right cool um and then um we actually have hope this works is so we said well what if we do two neurolink implants and we've been able to do uh dual neural link implants uh in actually i think three pigs at this point and we have a couple of them here um and we're able to show that you can actually have multiple neural links implanted um and again healthy and happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig so um so it's possible to have multiple links in your head and have them all be sending out signals and you're working well all right so we just showed you a demonstration of reading brain activity and let's see probably see that um as i'm saying each of those dots represents a neural spike and the um the blue chart at the bottom is showing an accumulation of neural spikes in that region so uh in in terms of additional uh brain reading activity uh when we have um say um one of our pigs on a treadmill and we're gonna treadmill um it's very funny concept really um and we uh take the readings from the neurons and we try to predict the position position of the joints um and so we say we have the predicted position of the joints and then we we measure the actual position of the joints you can see that they're almost exactly aligned so we're able with a wireless neural neural implant to actually predict the position of of all of the limbs in the pig's body with very high accuracy now in terms of of writing to the brain or stimulating neurons uh we also need precise control of the electric field in space and time we need a wide range of current for different brain regions some some regions require delicate stimulation some require a lot of current and you want obviously no harm to the brain over time um and the way we um by the way we analyze the the stimulated stimulating neurons uh is with a two-photon uh microspicy i always have trouble pronouncing that microscopy um and it's very impressive technology you can actually literally see in real time uh how the neurons are firing so uh the the red sort of things are the neurons red red sort of flashing things are the neurons uh firing or i should say the uh the electrodes firing so the red things are electrodes firing and then the green are the neuron bodies responding to the current from the electrode and we're making good progress towards clinical studies i'm excited to announce that we received a breakthrough device designation from the fda in july thanks to the hard work of the neurolink team so i want to be clear we're working closely with the fda and will will be extremely rigorous in fact we will we will significantly significantly exceed the minimum fda guidelines for uh safety we will make this uh as safe as possible but what are some likely first applications so our first clinical trial is aimed at people with paraplegia or tetraplegia so cervical spinal cord injury we're going to enroll we plan to enroll a small number of patients to make sure the device is safe and that it works in that case uh yeah so actually just to elaborate on that um if somebody is um like a severe spinal cord injury uh you know to agree that they even they have um very limited control even over their facial muscles i think something that's very exciting as a long-term application is if you can if you can sense what somebody's trying to do with their limbs what they want to do with their limbs then you can actually uh do a second implant that's at the base of the spine or wherever just after wherever the spinal injury occurred and you can you can create a neural shunt so we i i think long term i'm confident that long term it will be possible to restore somebody's full-body motion another question from twitter will you be able to save and replay memories in the future uh yes i think in the future you will be able to save and replay memories um i mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode um but uh well i guess they're pretty good predicting um but yeah essentially if you have a whole rain interface everything that's encoded in memory you could you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird uh one common theme that's been coming up a lot on these twitter questions coming in is that of availability and so matthias has a specific question on this which is any estimate of how much it will cost at launch and what price it will reduce to over time well i i think at at launch it's probably going to be it i would say that's not really representative because at first i think it's going to be you know quite expensive but that price will very rapidly drop and i think over time we want to get the the cost um obviously down as low as possible but i think um inclusive of the automated surgery i think we want to get the the price down to a few thousand dollars something like that um and i think that's possible i think it should be possible to get it similar to um lasik and and then the device electronics itself i think will will not be very expensive um because it actually does does use a lot of the parts that are made in extremely high volume in tens of millions of units for smartphones as well as smartwatches and wearables in general\n"