**The Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A New Era in Neurotechnology**

When people think of brain surgery, they often envision something invasive and traditional. The idea of implanting electrodes and wires into the brain is often associated with a high level of complexity and risk. However, researchers at NorLink are working to revolutionize this field by developing a new type of brain-computer interface (BCI) that is more like LASIK than traditional surgery.

**A New Approach to Brain Surgery**

The goal of NorLink's research is to simplify the process of creating a BCI and make it more accessible to patients. They aim to reduce the complexity and risk associated with traditional BCI systems, which often require general anesthesia and can result in unpleasant side effects such as nausea and sore throats. Instead, NorLink is working towards a system that can be implanted under conscious sedation, allowing patients to experience less discomfort and more control over the procedure.

**Microfabricated Sensors: The Key to Successful BCI Systems**

To achieve this goal, NorLink's researchers have developed microfabricated sensors made from thin films of polymers. These sensors are designed to be small enough to fit in a tiny footprint, yet they can still detect electrical activity in the brain with high accuracy. By using these sensors, NorLink is able to create BCI systems that are not only more accessible but also more precise and effective.

**The Design Process: From Concept to Reality**

NorLink's design process involves creating multiple iterations of their sensors and electronics until they achieve the desired performance and size. The team has developed over 20 different designs for their sensors, each one building on the previous one to increase the number of electrodes per thread without significantly increasing the width of each thread at the base. This incremental approach has allowed NorLink to refine their technology and achieve significant breakthroughs in terms of size and power.

**Assembling the Electronics: A Critical Step**

Once the sensor design is complete, the next step is to assemble the electronics. This involves attaching wires and insulation to the sensors, which requires a high level of precision and care. The team uses a laser welding process to attach the wired lid to the device, ensuring that it is secure and reliable.

**The Result: A Breakthrough in BCI Technology**

After years of research and development, NorLink's breakthrough technology is finally ready for use. Their sensor is significantly smaller than any other similar architecture on the market, with one pixel dedicated per electrode. This means that they can detect even more subtle patterns in brain activity, allowing for more precise control over prosthetic devices.

**Decoding Algorithms: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential**

But NorLink's technology is not just about creating a BCI system - it's also about decoding the signals that the sensors produce. To do this, they have developed sophisticated algorithms that can analyze the data from the sensor and extract meaningful information. These algorithms are tuned using real-time data and allow NorLink to decode movement, even when the person making the movement is not actually doing so.

**The Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces: Restoring Speech and Unlocking Human Potential**

NorLink's ultimate goal is to give people access to the representations in their brain that control movement and action. They believe that by decoding these signals, they can restore speech to paralyzed individuals who are no longer able to talk. But that's not all - NorLink also hopes to unlock human potential by giving people access to new abilities, such as running or dancing. The possibilities are endless, and the team at NorLink is excited to see where their technology will take them.

**The Power of Decoding Algorithms**

To illustrate the power of decoding algorithms, NorLink's researchers created a simple decoder using fake data. To their surprise, it was able to capture the intended movement with remarkable accuracy. This is just a small example of what can be achieved with sophisticated decoding algorithms. By unlocking the hidden patterns in brain activity, NorLink hopes to give people access to new abilities and capabilities that were previously unimaginable.

**Unlocking the Secrets of the Human Brain**

NorLink's technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with our brains and computers. By giving people access to the representations in their brain that control movement and action, they can unlock new possibilities for rehabilitation, prosthetics, and even gaming. The team at NorLink is committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with BCI technology, and their work has the potential to change the world.

**The Potential Applications of NorLink's Technology**

So what are the potential applications of NorLink's technology? One of the most exciting possibilities is restoring speech to paralyzed individuals who are no longer able to talk. This could have a profound impact on people's lives, allowing them to communicate with their loved ones and interact with the world in ways that were previously impossible. But NorLink's technology is not just limited to rehabilitation - it also has potential applications in gaming, education, and even art.

**The Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A New Era for Human Connection**

As NorLink continues to develop their technology, they are creating a new era for human connection. By giving people access to the representations in their brain that control movement and action, they can unlock new possibilities for interaction and communication. The future of BCI technology is exciting and uncertain, but one thing is clear - it has the potential to change the world forever.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody so that that video was not shutterstock that was actually your link so that that's actual video from the company so if you want to get a sense for what it's like to work near a link that video is indicative of the atmosphere of your link it's an incredibly talented team and you're gonna hear a lot from from them tonight so we're gonna actually go quite into depth on what we're doing why we're doing how we're doing it and I'm just incredibly impressed with the caliber of of talent at your link and the in fact the the main reason for during this presentation is recruiting and this will be a slow process where we will gradually increase the issues that we solve until ultimately we can do a full brain machine interface yeah those are going to sound pretty weird but achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence but I think with a high bandwidth brain machine interface I think we can actually go along for the ride and we can effectively have the option of merging with AI and this is extremely important of nearly 100 billion cells called neurons neurons come in many complex shapes but generally they have a dendritic Arbor a cell body called a Selma and an axon the neurons of your brain connect to form a large network through axon dendrite junctions called synapses but these connection points neurons communicate with each other using chemical signals called neurotransmitters neurotransmitters are released from the end of an axon in response to an electrical spike called an action potential when a cell receives enough of the right kind of neurotransmitter input a chain reaction is triggered that causes an action potential to fire and the neuron to in turn relay messages to its own downstream synapses action potentials produce an electric field that spreads from the neuron and can be detected by placing electrodes nearby allowing recording of the information represented by a neuron a goal is to record from and stimulate spikes in neurons and do so in a way that is orders of magnitude more than anything has been done to date and safe and good enough that you can it's not like a major operation it's sort of equivalent to just sort of a LASIK type of thing so this is in contrast to the the best fda-approved system which is like a Parkinson's deep brain stimulation a thing which would have on the order of 10 electrodes so the system even in version 1 that we're going to unveil today is capable of a thousand times more electrodes than the the best system out there and they're all read and write so this is this is really quite I think I mean for something to be a thousand times more than what is public approved is quite a big difference so that there's there's very tiny threads that are about about 1/10 roughly of the cross sectional area of a human hair so there are extremely tiny threads in fact the threads that we have it likes it even in version one are about the same size as a neuron so if you're gonna go stick something in your brain you wanted to not be giant you want to be tiny and to be approximately on par with the things that are already there the neurons you really need this to be done with the robot because it's very tiny and it needs to be very precise so you don't and you don't want to pierce a blood vessel so when you're in so each thread that the robot looks look sort of basically through a microscope and put a inserts each electrode specifically bypassing any vasculature you know any kind of blood vessel and and making sure it's like inserted without causing trauma or minimal trauma so just give you a sense of scale this is how tiny the threads are that is not even a big finger that is a small finger so the the these threads are just like like I said where smaller than hair and there's a thousand of them and this is what what the robot looks like it's sort of quite quite a complex device but it I it all comes down to a very tiny tiny point so just like you see the robot the robots on the left and and then the what looks like the needles for insertion next to a penny but in fact that the actual needle that gets inserted is way way tinier it's that little tiny thing at the where the arrow is pointing that's actually the size of the the needle it's about 24 microns in diameter it's so small you can't really even see it within the picture with the penny you can get a sense for the robot doing the electrode insertion but that's a very zoomed in view so they're all very very tiny and the robot is very selectively very doubt very delicately and and then this is what the gym looks like so action potentials so the each one of those represents one electrode so there would be up to ten thousands of these that these lines the the operation on a per chip basis it involves just a a two meal a two millimeter incision which is dilated to eight millimeters and then the the the Chavez placed placed through that and then we add it goes back to being two millimeters and you can basically good shot you're gonna need a stitch and then the the interface to the to the to the chip is what is wireless so you have no wires poking out of your head very very important so you it's it's basically bluetooth to your phone because we'll have to watch the App Store updates for that one make sure we don't have a driver issue and we hope to have this aspirationally and in a human patient before the end of next year so this is not not far I'm Mac so doc I'm the president of of neural link so I've wanted to build a neural interface has really been like a central goal of my life basically as long as I can remember this is I think like we talked about AI being potentially the last invention that we have I think that I've been with BMI might be like really the first invention in many ways of like the next chapter of us it's just really like as Elon alluded to earlier everything about your experience or thoughts or memories it's all in your brain and represented in the firing statistics of action potentials we knew as Ellen mentioned that whatever we built we wanted it to be completely wireless it had to be something that would last for a long period of time not something that you'd have to take out at two three or four years in this is a photo of some of the prototypes that we've gone through over that over that time so we started on the far left that's the entirely passive board that has 64 electrodes on it and connects two connectors that go to big external amplifiers and then we added integrator chronics with our first custom ship that's also 64 64 channels and then there is a big leap to the the device that Ilan showed a photo of earlier that has 3072 electrodes and a fully implantable package with just a USB C port coming out and then we we took a step back in channel count B's room we have to optimize safety longevity and bandwidth all together and so in order to optimize some of those other things we moved to an easier to manufacture system as 1536 channels in a USB C port and those last two are the focus of the paper that we released today and they taught us a lot about the architecture that we think is the basis for our first human product that we're calling n1 and the central component of that is the n1 sensor this is it's a little hermetic package it's about it's when it's fully assembled this is missing an outer mold it's into an 8 millimeter diameter force millimeter tall cylinder exploding it blowing like opening it up a little bit you can see there's there's the thin film which has the threads that heal I'm talked about which is the wisp going off to the side there's a hermetic substrate and then that gets welded later to a package that goes over top and that's mated to our custom electronics and you really can't manipulate these with your hands that that part at the top is just a backing material that's surgical packaging there they're peeled off the threads were peeled off that one at a time by the robot to place it into the brain and the first impetus for this is just you have to place these threads you can't manipulate these threads you need a robot and then that turned out to that grew into understanding where the blood vessels are and imaging into the tissue and the surface of the brain moves because you're breathing and you have a heartbeat and there's lots of complexity of dealing with this incredibly high entropy substrate and so the n1 implant we can place as Elin mentioned many of these possibly up to 10 in one hemisphere for our first patients we're looking at four four sensors three in motor areas and one in a somatosensory area and that connect wirelessly through the skin to a wearable device that we call the link which contains a Bluetooth radio and a battery it'll be controlled through an iPhone app you won't have to go to a doctor's office and have them have an exotic programmer to to configure it and so the for the first product where we're really focusing on three distinct types of control the first is giving patients the ability to control their mobile device to be as we heard from over and over again from patient groups that if you have to have a care taker around the pressed buttons for you what's the point you might as well have them do the thing you have to get self sufficient using using the devices on your own but we are working as hard as we can towards our first in human clinical study next year we developed this robot that can rapidly and precisely insert hundreds of individual threads representing thousands of distinct electrodes into the cortex in less than an hour this tool allows the surgeon to aim between the blood vessels they'll cover the surface of the brain with micron scale precision here the robot is selecting individual electrode threads and placing them into the brain in the pre-planned location with remarkable accuracy and repeatability when you think of traditional neurosurgery you probably think of something very invasive traditional surgery on the brain isn't something that patients ever look forward to or are excited about except in the most dire circumstances usually a clamp is attached to the skull to keep it rigidly immobilized to the operating table we often shave all or most of the patients hair patients can end up with large visible scars at neural link we want to create an entirely different patient experience something more like LASIK we even want this to be possible under conscious sedation that means you can get rid of the complexity and the risk of general anesthesia as well as many of the unpleasant side effects nausea sore throat from a breathing tube but our aim is to simplify the procedure down to the injection of local anesthetic a very small opening in the skin a painless opening in the skull below quick and precise placement of threads into the cortex and then we fill that hole in the skull with the sensor allowing the scalp to be closed up over it currently there are no research or commercial commercial devices that meet all of our requirements so we built one out of microfabricated thumb film polymers and an average strand of hair is about a hundred microns yet in the small footprint we're able to fit our electrodes our wires and insulation for each of those wires this design is called linear edge it's one of over 20 designs that we've made for our R&D work we progressively been increasing the number of electrodes per thread without significantly increasing the width of each of these threads at the base next we assemble the electronics and then also attach a wired lid using a laser welding process these two steps have required a lot of internal development as well the result is the sensor that's ready for final assembly and implants into the body since the start of nor link we've gone through three major revisions to the analog pixel progressively improving both the size and power while maintaining performance and our latest pixel on the right is at least five times smaller than the known state-of-the-art of similar architecture with one pixel dedicated per electrode as published in the academic literature all of these functionalities that I outlined are integrated into a single four by five millimeter so it can die each this is in fact traces of a bunch of electrodes that came off of one of our devices a bunch of electrodes from a single thread and each trace shows you a voltage waveform in time as it's coming off of one of those threads we have algorithms that can detect these spikes in real time as they're happening and that allows us to collect data that looks something like this this is what we call a spike raster so each row there represents one channel of recording and time goes from left to right and each of those little tick marks is the time of a single spike in action potential if you look at that you might think that looks pretty messy and it's not clear what's going on but I'm gonna do a little trick I want to take those neurons I want to rearrange them so that they're in the order of the tuning that they have but just as I told you about those two neurons and if you do that look what happens now suddenly structure emerges and I think you'll agree looking at that but there's information in that stack of neurons that tells you about the movement and that's exactly what we want to do we want to do that kind of magic in an automated way to read out and to read out the movement the way we do that is by building something that we call decoding algorithms these are mathematical algorithms that we tune based on data like these to be able to take in just those raster's of spiking activity and output the movement that's that the person wants to make for these little fake data I built a very very simple decoder and sure enough it's able to to capture the intended movement this is what we want to do on a bigger scale but even if you're not actually making the movement even if you're just thinking about the movement or even if you're watching someone else make movement the cells and motor cortex respond in a similar way with that we think the people will be able to get naturalistic control over the computers not just a mouse but also keyboard game controllers and potentially other devices that's what we're trying to do so potentially with a device like this you could restore speech to a paralyzed person who's no longer able to talk but there's no reason in principle that we can't reach all of motor cortex and that would give us access to any movement that a person thinks about any movement at all a person could imagine running or dancing or even kungfu and we would be able to decode that signal but knurling wants to do is to give people the ability to tap into those representations to get act better access to that information both to repair broken brain circuits and also to ultimately give us better access to better connections to the world to each other and to ourselveshello everybody so that that video was not shutterstock that was actually your link so that that's actual video from the company so if you want to get a sense for what it's like to work near a link that video is indicative of the atmosphere of your link it's an incredibly talented team and you're gonna hear a lot from from them tonight so we're gonna actually go quite into depth on what we're doing why we're doing how we're doing it and I'm just incredibly impressed with the caliber of of talent at your link and the in fact the the main reason for during this presentation is recruiting and this will be a slow process where we will gradually increase the issues that we solve until ultimately we can do a full brain machine interface yeah those are going to sound pretty weird but achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence but I think with a high bandwidth brain machine interface I think we can actually go along for the ride and we can effectively have the option of merging with AI and this is extremely important of nearly 100 billion cells called neurons neurons come in many complex shapes but generally they have a dendritic Arbor a cell body called a Selma and an axon the neurons of your brain connect to form a large network through axon dendrite junctions called synapses but these connection points neurons communicate with each other using chemical signals called neurotransmitters neurotransmitters are released from the end of an axon in response to an electrical spike called an action potential when a cell receives enough of the right kind of neurotransmitter input a chain reaction is triggered that causes an action potential to fire and the neuron to in turn relay messages to its own downstream synapses action potentials produce an electric field that spreads from the neuron and can be detected by placing electrodes nearby allowing recording of the information represented by a neuron a goal is to record from and stimulate spikes in neurons and do so in a way that is orders of magnitude more than anything has been done to date and safe and good enough that you can it's not like a major operation it's sort of equivalent to just sort of a LASIK type of thing so this is in contrast to the the best fda-approved system which is like a Parkinson's deep brain stimulation a thing which would have on the order of 10 electrodes so the system even in version 1 that we're going to unveil today is capable of a thousand times more electrodes than the the best system out there and they're all read and write so this is this is really quite I think I mean for something to be a thousand times more than what is public approved is quite a big difference so that there's there's very tiny threads that are about about 1/10 roughly of the cross sectional area of a human hair so there are extremely tiny threads in fact the threads that we have it likes it even in version one are about the same size as a neuron so if you're gonna go stick something in your brain you wanted to not be giant you want to be tiny and to be approximately on par with the things that are already there the neurons you really need this to be done with the robot because it's very tiny and it needs to be very precise so you don't and you don't want to pierce a blood vessel so when you're in so each thread that the robot looks look sort of basically through a microscope and put a inserts each electrode specifically bypassing any vasculature you know any kind of blood vessel and and making sure it's like inserted without causing trauma or minimal trauma so just give you a sense of scale this is how tiny the threads are that is not even a big finger that is a small finger so the the these threads are just like like I said where smaller than hair and there's a thousand of them and this is what what the robot looks like it's sort of quite quite a complex device but it I it all comes down to a very tiny tiny point so just like you see the robot the robots on the left and and then the what looks like the needles for insertion next to a penny but in fact that the actual needle that gets inserted is way way tinier it's that little tiny thing at the where the arrow is pointing that's actually the size of the the needle it's about 24 microns in diameter it's so small you can't really even see it within the picture with the penny you can get a sense for the robot doing the electrode insertion but that's a very zoomed in view so they're all very very tiny and the robot is very selectively very doubt very delicately and and then this is what the gym looks like so action potentials so the each one of those represents one electrode so there would be up to ten thousands of these that these lines the the operation on a per chip basis it involves just a a two meal a two millimeter incision which is dilated to eight millimeters and then the the the Chavez placed placed through that and then we add it goes back to being two millimeters and you can basically good shot you're gonna need a stitch and then the the interface to the to the to the chip is what is wireless so you have no wires poking out of your head very very important so you it's it's basically bluetooth to your phone because we'll have to watch the App Store updates for that one make sure we don't have a driver issue and we hope to have this aspirationally and in a human patient before the end of next year so this is not not far I'm Mac so doc I'm the president of of neural link so I've wanted to build a neural interface has really been like a central goal of my life basically as long as I can remember this is I think like we talked about AI being potentially the last invention that we have I think that I've been with BMI might be like really the first invention in many ways of like the next chapter of us it's just really like as Elon alluded to earlier everything about your experience or thoughts or memories it's all in your brain and represented in the firing statistics of action potentials we knew as Ellen mentioned that whatever we built we wanted it to be completely wireless it had to be something that would last for a long period of time not something that you'd have to take out at two three or four years in this is a photo of some of the prototypes that we've gone through over that over that time so we started on the far left that's the entirely passive board that has 64 electrodes on it and connects two connectors that go to big external amplifiers and then we added integrator chronics with our first custom ship that's also 64 64 channels and then there is a big leap to the the device that Ilan showed a photo of earlier that has 3072 electrodes and a fully implantable package with just a USB C port coming out and then we we took a step back in channel count B's room we have to optimize safety longevity and bandwidth all together and so in order to optimize some of those other things we moved to an easier to manufacture system as 1536 channels in a USB C port and those last two are the focus of the paper that we released today and they taught us a lot about the architecture that we think is the basis for our first human product that we're calling n1 and the central component of that is the n1 sensor this is it's a little hermetic package it's about it's when it's fully assembled this is missing an outer mold it's into an 8 millimeter diameter force millimeter tall cylinder exploding it blowing like opening it up a little bit you can see there's there's the thin film which has the threads that heal I'm talked about which is the wisp going off to the side there's a hermetic substrate and then that gets welded later to a package that goes over top and that's mated to our custom electronics and you really can't manipulate these with your hands that that part at the top is just a backing material that's surgical packaging there they're peeled off the threads were peeled off that one at a time by the robot to place it into the brain and the first impetus for this is just you have to place these threads you can't manipulate these threads you need a robot and then that turned out to that grew into understanding where the blood vessels are and imaging into the tissue and the surface of the brain moves because you're breathing and you have a heartbeat and there's lots of complexity of dealing with this incredibly high entropy substrate and so the n1 implant we can place as Elin mentioned many of these possibly up to 10 in one hemisphere for our first patients we're looking at four four sensors three in motor areas and one in a somatosensory area and that connect wirelessly through the skin to a wearable device that we call the link which contains a Bluetooth radio and a battery it'll be controlled through an iPhone app you won't have to go to a doctor's office and have them have an exotic programmer to to configure it and so the for the first product where we're really focusing on three distinct types of control the first is giving patients the ability to control their mobile device to be as we heard from over and over again from patient groups that if you have to have a care taker around the pressed buttons for you what's the point you might as well have them do the thing you have to get self sufficient using using the devices on your own but we are working as hard as we can towards our first in human clinical study next year we developed this robot that can rapidly and precisely insert hundreds of individual threads representing thousands of distinct electrodes into the cortex in less than an hour this tool allows the surgeon to aim between the blood vessels they'll cover the surface of the brain with micron scale precision here the robot is selecting individual electrode threads and placing them into the brain in the pre-planned location with remarkable accuracy and repeatability when you think of traditional neurosurgery you probably think of something very invasive traditional surgery on the brain isn't something that patients ever look forward to or are excited about except in the most dire circumstances usually a clamp is attached to the skull to keep it rigidly immobilized to the operating table we often shave all or most of the patients hair patients can end up with large visible scars at neural link we want to create an entirely different patient experience something more like LASIK we even want this to be possible under conscious sedation that means you can get rid of the complexity and the risk of general anesthesia as well as many of the unpleasant side effects nausea sore throat from a breathing tube but our aim is to simplify the procedure down to the injection of local anesthetic a very small opening in the skin a painless opening in the skull below quick and precise placement of threads into the cortex and then we fill that hole in the skull with the sensor allowing the scalp to be closed up over it currently there are no research or commercial commercial devices that meet all of our requirements so we built one out of microfabricated thumb film polymers and an average strand of hair is about a hundred microns yet in the small footprint we're able to fit our electrodes our wires and insulation for each of those wires this design is called linear edge it's one of over 20 designs that we've made for our R&D work we progressively been increasing the number of electrodes per thread without significantly increasing the width of each of these threads at the base next we assemble the electronics and then also attach a wired lid using a laser welding process these two steps have required a lot of internal development as well the result is the sensor that's ready for final assembly and implants into the body since the start of nor link we've gone through three major revisions to the analog pixel progressively improving both the size and power while maintaining performance and our latest pixel on the right is at least five times smaller than the known state-of-the-art of similar architecture with one pixel dedicated per electrode as published in the academic literature all of these functionalities that I outlined are integrated into a single four by five millimeter so it can die each this is in fact traces of a bunch of electrodes that came off of one of our devices a bunch of electrodes from a single thread and each trace shows you a voltage waveform in time as it's coming off of one of those threads we have algorithms that can detect these spikes in real time as they're happening and that allows us to collect data that looks something like this this is what we call a spike raster so each row there represents one channel of recording and time goes from left to right and each of those little tick marks is the time of a single spike in action potential if you look at that you might think that looks pretty messy and it's not clear what's going on but I'm gonna do a little trick I want to take those neurons I want to rearrange them so that they're in the order of the tuning that they have but just as I told you about those two neurons and if you do that look what happens now suddenly structure emerges and I think you'll agree looking at that but there's information in that stack of neurons that tells you about the movement and that's exactly what we want to do we want to do that kind of magic in an automated way to read out and to read out the movement the way we do that is by building something that we call decoding algorithms these are mathematical algorithms that we tune based on data like these to be able to take in just those raster's of spiking activity and output the movement that's that the person wants to make for these little fake data I built a very very simple decoder and sure enough it's able to to capture the intended movement this is what we want to do on a bigger scale but even if you're not actually making the movement even if you're just thinking about the movement or even if you're watching someone else make movement the cells and motor cortex respond in a similar way with that we think the people will be able to get naturalistic control over the computers not just a mouse but also keyboard game controllers and potentially other devices that's what we're trying to do so potentially with a device like this you could restore speech to a paralyzed person who's no longer able to talk but there's no reason in principle that we can't reach all of motor cortex and that would give us access to any movement that a person thinks about any movement at all a person could imagine running or dancing or even kungfu and we would be able to decode that signal but knurling wants to do is to give people the ability to tap into those representations to get act better access to that information both to repair broken brain circuits and also to ultimately give us better access to better connections to the world to each other and to ourselveshello everybody so that that video was not shutterstock that was actually your link so that that's actual video from the company so if you want to get a sense for what it's like to work near a link that video is indicative of the atmosphere of your link it's an incredibly talented team and you're gonna hear a lot from from them tonight so we're gonna actually go quite into depth on what we're doing why we're doing how we're doing it and I'm just incredibly impressed with the caliber of of talent at your link and the in fact the the main reason for during this presentation is recruiting and this will be a slow process where we will gradually increase the issues that we solve until ultimately we can do a full brain machine interface yeah those are going to sound pretty weird but achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence but I think with a high bandwidth brain machine interface I think we can actually go along for the ride and we can effectively have the option of merging with AI and this is extremely important of nearly 100 billion cells called neurons neurons come in many complex shapes but generally they have a dendritic Arbor a cell body called a Selma and an axon the neurons of your brain connect to form a large network through axon dendrite junctions called synapses but these connection points neurons communicate with each other using chemical signals called neurotransmitters neurotransmitters are released from the end of an axon in response to an electrical spike called an action potential when a cell receives enough of the right kind of neurotransmitter input a chain reaction is triggered that causes an action potential to fire and the neuron to in turn relay messages to its own downstream synapses action potentials produce an electric field that spreads from the neuron and can be detected by placing electrodes nearby allowing recording of the information represented by a neuron a goal is to record from and stimulate spikes in neurons and do so in a way that is orders of magnitude more than anything has been done to date and safe and good enough that you can it's not like a major operation it's sort of equivalent to just sort of a LASIK type of thing so this is in contrast to the the best fda-approved system which is like a Parkinson's deep brain stimulation a thing which would have on the order of 10 electrodes so the system even in version 1 that we're going to unveil today is capable of a thousand times more electrodes than the the best system out there and they're all read and write so this is this is really quite I think I mean for something to be a thousand times more than what is public approved is quite a big difference so that there's there's very tiny threads that are about about 1/10 roughly of the cross sectional area of a human hair so there are extremely tiny threads in fact the threads that we have it likes it even in version one are about the same size as a neuron so if you're gonna go stick something in your brain you wanted to not be giant you want to be tiny and to be approximately on par with the things that are already there the neurons you really need this to be done with the robot because it's very tiny and it needs to be very precise so you don't and you don't want to pierce a blood vessel so when you're in so each thread that the robot looks look sort of basically through a microscope and put a inserts each electrode specifically bypassing any vasculature you know any kind of blood vessel and and making sure it's like inserted without causing trauma or minimal trauma so just give you a sense of scale this is how tiny the threads are that is not even a big finger that is a small finger so the the these threads are just like like I said where smaller than hair and there's a thousand of them and this is what what the robot looks like it's sort of quite quite a complex device but it I it all comes down to a very tiny tiny point so just like you see the robot the robots on the left and and then the what looks like the needles for insertion next to a penny but in fact that the actual needle that gets inserted is way way tinier it's that little tiny thing at the where the arrow is pointing that's actually the size of the the needle it's about 24 microns in diameter it's so small you can't really even see it within the picture with the penny you can get a sense for the robot doing the electrode insertion but that's a very zoomed in view so they're all very very tiny and the robot is very selectively very doubt very delicately and and then this is what the gym looks like so action potentials so the each one of those represents one electrode so there would be up to ten thousands of these that these lines the the operation on a per chip basis it involves just a a two meal a two millimeter incision which is dilated to eight millimeters and then the the the Chavez placed placed through that and then we add it goes back to being two millimeters and you can basically good shot you're gonna need a stitch and then the the interface to the to the to the chip is what is wireless so you have no wires poking out of your head very very important so you it's it's basically bluetooth to your phone because we'll have to watch the App Store updates for that one make sure we don't have a driver issue and we hope to have this aspirationally and in a human patient before the end of next year so this is not not far I'm Mac so doc I'm the president of of neural link so I've wanted to build a neural interface has really been like a central goal of my life basically as long as I can remember this is I think like we talked about AI being potentially the last invention that we have I think that I've been with BMI might be like really the first invention in many ways of like the next chapter of us it's just really like as Elon alluded to earlier everything about your experience or thoughts or memories it's all in your brain and represented in the firing statistics of action potentials we knew as Ellen mentioned that whatever we built we wanted it to be completely wireless it had to be something that would last for a long period of time not something that you'd have to take out at two three or four years in this is a photo of some of the prototypes that we've gone through over that over that time so we started on the far left that's the entirely passive board that has 64 electrodes on it and connects two connectors that go to big external amplifiers and then we added integrator chronics with our first custom ship that's also 64 64 channels and then there is a big leap to the the device that Ilan showed a photo of earlier that has 3072 electrodes and a fully implantable package with just a USB C port coming out and then we we took a step back in channel count B's room we have to optimize safety longevity and bandwidth all together and so in order to optimize some of those other things we moved to an easier to manufacture system as 1536 channels in a USB C port and those last two are the focus of the paper that we released today and they taught us a lot about the architecture that we think is the basis for our first human product that we're calling n1 and the central component of that is the n1 sensor this is it's a little hermetic package it's about it's when it's fully assembled this is missing an outer mold it's into an 8 millimeter diameter force millimeter tall cylinder exploding it blowing like opening it up a little bit you can see there's there's the thin film which has the threads that heal I'm talked about which is the wisp going off to the side there's a hermetic substrate and then that gets welded later to a package that goes over top and that's mated to our custom electronics and you really can't manipulate these with your hands that that part at the top is just a backing material that's surgical packaging there they're peeled off the threads were peeled off that one at a time by the robot to place it into the brain and the first impetus for this is just you have to place these threads you can't manipulate these threads you need a robot and then that turned out to that grew into understanding where the blood vessels are and imaging into the tissue and the surface of the brain moves because you're breathing and you have a heartbeat and there's lots of complexity of dealing with this incredibly high entropy substrate and so the n1 implant we can place as Elin mentioned many of these possibly up to 10 in one hemisphere for our first patients we're looking at four four sensors three in motor areas and one in a somatosensory area and that connect wirelessly through the skin to a wearable device that we call the link which contains a Bluetooth radio and a battery it'll be controlled through an iPhone app you won't have to go to a doctor's office and have them have an exotic programmer to to configure it and so the for the first product where we're really focusing on three distinct types of control the first is giving patients the ability to control their mobile device to be as we heard from over and over again from patient groups that if you have to have a care taker around the pressed buttons for you what's the point you might as well have them do the thing you have to get self sufficient using using the devices on your own but we are working as hard as we can towards our first in human clinical study next year we developed this robot that can rapidly and precisely insert hundreds of individual threads representing thousands of distinct electrodes into the cortex in less than an hour this tool allows the surgeon to aim between the blood vessels they'll cover the surface of the brain with micron scale precision here the robot is selecting individual electrode threads and placing them into the brain in the pre-planned location with remarkable accuracy and repeatability when you think of traditional neurosurgery you probably think of something very invasive traditional surgery on the brain isn't something that patients ever look forward to or are excited about except in the most dire circumstances usually a clamp is attached to the skull to keep it rigidly immobilized to the operating table we often shave all or most of the patients hair patients can end up with large visible scars at neural link we want to create an entirely different patient experience something more like LASIK we even want this to be possible under conscious sedation that means you can get rid of the complexity and the risk of general anesthesia as well as many of the unpleasant side effects nausea sore throat from a breathing tube but our aim is to simplify the procedure down to the injection of local anesthetic a very small opening in the skin a painless opening in the skull below quick and precise placement of threads into the cortex and then we fill that hole in the skull with the sensor allowing the scalp to be closed up over it currently there are no research or commercial commercial devices that meet all of our requirements so we built one out of microfabricated thumb film polymers and an average strand of hair is about a hundred microns yet in the small footprint we're able to fit our electrodes our wires and insulation for each of those wires this design is called linear edge it's one of over 20 designs that we've made for our R&D work we progressively been increasing the number of electrodes per thread without significantly increasing the width of each of these threads at the base next we assemble the electronics and then also attach a wired lid using a laser welding process these two steps have required a lot of internal development as well the result is the sensor that's ready for final assembly and implants into the body since the start of nor link we've gone through three major revisions to the analog pixel progressively improving both the size and power while maintaining performance and our latest pixel on the right is at least five times smaller than the known state-of-the-art of similar architecture with one pixel dedicated per electrode as published in the academic literature all of these functionalities that I outlined are integrated into a single four by five millimeter so it can die each this is in fact traces of a bunch of electrodes that came off of one of our devices a bunch of electrodes from a single thread and each trace shows you a voltage waveform in time as it's coming off of one of those threads we have algorithms that can detect these spikes in real time as they're happening and that allows us to collect data that looks something like this this is what we call a spike raster so each row there represents one channel of recording and time goes from left to right and each of those little tick marks is the time of a single spike in action potential if you look at that you might think that looks pretty messy and it's not clear what's going on but I'm gonna do a little trick I want to take those neurons I want to rearrange them so that they're in the order of the tuning that they have but just as I told you about those two neurons and if you do that look what happens now suddenly structure emerges and I think you'll agree looking at that but there's information in that stack of neurons that tells you about the movement and that's exactly what we want to do we want to do that kind of magic in an automated way to read out and to read out the movement the way we do that is by building something that we call decoding algorithms these are mathematical algorithms that we tune based on data like these to be able to take in just those raster's of spiking activity and output the movement that's that the person wants to make for these little fake data I built a very very simple decoder and sure enough it's able to to capture the intended movement this is what we want to do on a bigger scale but even if you're not actually making the movement even if you're just thinking about the movement or even if you're watching someone else make movement the cells and motor cortex respond in a similar way with that we think the people will be able to get naturalistic control over the computers not just a mouse but also keyboard game controllers and potentially other devices that's what we're trying to do so potentially with a device like this you could restore speech to a paralyzed person who's no longer able to talk but there's no reason in principle that we can't reach all of motor cortex and that would give us access to any movement that a person thinks about any movement at all a person could imagine running or dancing or even kungfu and we would be able to decode that signal but knurling wants to do is to give people the ability to tap into those representations to get act better access to that information both to repair broken brain circuits and also to ultimately give us better access to better connections to the world to each other and to ourselves\n"