Telepathy

👉 Read on to hear about:

• Giving humans telepathic powers

• Curing blindness

• Implanting wires less than a hairs-width across

• Reading a book in less than a second

Noland Arbaugh is a 29-year-old who was involved in a car accident, leaving him a quadriplegic. He requires assistance for most activities in his life and needs specialised equipment to use a computer. I cannot imagine the struggles he and his family go through on a day-to-day basis simply managing. 

Last week Noland featured in a live-stream, from a company called Neuralink, where he played chess on a computer screen simply by using his mind. No joy-sticks, no specialised equipment. He just thought about where he wanted the cursor to go, and it moved there. Neuralink are calling this Telepathy. He described using Neuralink as like “using the force,” in Star Wars.

Telepathic abilities are powers usually restricted to superhero films or comic books, providing the ability to convey thoughts with just the power of the mind. This demonstration from Neuralink last week seems to have moved telepathy from fiction to reality.

The human body contains a network of neurons. These neurons run throughout your entire body with the control centre being your brain. Think of neurons as telephone wires, with a central telephone exchange being located in your brain. Everything that occurs anywhere in your body is controlled by this telephone exchange.

Our laptops, phones and cars are powered by a battery that transports electricity around a network of circuits and a processor. Both our brains and our devices run on the same thing: electrical energy. This means with the right engineering, we can build an interface between a computer and our brain. The hard part is translating the messages from your brain to your computer and vice versa.

This is the challenge the Neuralink team have set upon solving, carrying the mission to: Create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.

Noland was the first patient.

But why does this matter?

For all of human medical history, we have struggled to understand the brain and its diseases. Those suffering from psychological disorders were burnt at the stake and up until 50 years ago, we mistakenly thought homosexuality was a disease. The brain is the most complex organ on planet earth and that makes it hard to treat when something goes wrong. 

A giant part of this puzzle will be solved by having a more grounded and deeper knowledge of how the brain works and critically being able to influence its function.

To solve this, Neuralink has broken down their roadmap into two distinct phases:

1. Clinical Applications: Treating people with medical conditions such as ALS or paralysis. 

2. Increasing the “bandwidth” of human connection: Enabling people to consume and upload significantly more data.

Clinical Applications:

The possible curable/solvable conditions are almost endless - anything that is caused/impacted by the brain can be altered. Which in the human body is everything. Diseases like Motor Neurone disease, Parkinson’s and even traumatic spinal injuries can be remedied.

A person missing a limb, for example, would be able to control a prosthetic exactly how they would control a natural limb - it’s even being planned to have sensory feedback, enabling sensors in the prosthetic to give the person a genuine feeling of touching things and moving. 

To go back to Noland, if he wanted to interact with a computer previously, he had to use a stick with his mouth. This would involve him holding his neck in uncomfortable positions and having very little control. Imagine for a second as you type your next email, having to do it with your tongue. It's unbelievable. 

The impact this will have on his life is enormous, and the abilities of the device will only improve.

Funnily, Noland admitted he spent his first night with Neuralink playing Civilisation 6, a game he’d previously “given up on,” due to having no convenient way to interface with it.

Increasing bandwidth:

It is generally considered at the moment humans can pass information to one another at 40 bits per second - about 5 characters of text.

Computers can handle 40 million bits per second. So humans are accessing data 1,000,000 times slower than a computer can. Neuralink aims to substantially increase the bandwidth of data transfer in and out of the human brain. This could theoretically elevate human communication speeds closer to those of current digital devices.

Humans are used to learning at the speed at which we can consume data and process it, whether that is by listening, reading, watching or a combination of all of them. You can only read a book so fast.

What happens when those restrictions are removed? We can then consume data at the speed of the limiting factor, at which point might be a computer. It’s possible all the knowledge in a textbook, or even the contents of an entire university degree could be uploaded to your brain in a matter of seconds rather than years.

The expression re-wire your brain will take an entirely new meaning.

How have they done this?

There are two engineering marvels that have enabled this:

1. An incredibly precise surgical robot is used to implant the chip. These need to be precisely located on exact neurons to be able to record the electric signals. A human even with medical-grade tweezers and a perfectly steady hand, would never stand a chance of doing this without damaging the patient. 
   
   The robotics use high-resolution cameras and computer vision models (AI) to neatly locate the chip in the exact right position. Truly great engineering!

2. The implant itself. It’s small - only about the size of a £1 coin - the tiny electrodes are exceptionally thin - less than the width of a human hair. It has 64 small threads (wires) locating 1024 electrodes, picking up signals from single neurons in the brain. The entire implant had to be small enough to fit in a human skull, non-invasive enough that people wouldn’t be intimidated by it and carry all the necessary technology.

Noland is a pioneering patient who has taken an extraordinary leap, powered by the work of an extraordinary team, and like all technologies with time and effort, the power of this system will only improve. With more patients and more data, the speed at which they get to solving some of the most debilitating and crippling of conditions will increase. This is a great innovation for humanity.

Some links to learn more:

Neuralinks website → https://neuralink.com/#n1

Noland’s live stream showing off the device → https://x.com/neuralink/status/1770563939413496146?s=20

The engineering behind the surgical robot →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gQn-evdsAo

Noland’s story →