The original sentence is "it's an Albany expression". You chose "Hebrew" instead of a place's name in Israel. You offer no explanation for that. You can downvote me as much as you want, does not change the fact that this is not-so-thinly veiled antisemitism.
lledrtx
joined 10 months ago
Yes you are right, they are trying to improve on what exists. My response was more for the "OMG musk is doing a sci-fi" - recording spikes is not really new or hard.
Both of them can be done shitty-ly now. But to do it with quality that even healthy people will voluntarily get it? That would need several breakthroughs.
We can stimulate some neurons now; to be able to stimulate enough neurons to do either of those in good quality will be hard. Cutting edge stuff can stimulate ~1000 neurons (only monkeys not even humans) but the human optical nerve is more than a million fibers. So we probably will need 3 orders of magnitude improvement and somehow do it in humans safely.
He has so much money that he can keep doing it. And hire the best in the field - there's no money in academia so of course they'll go. And then he'll take credit for their hard work eventually of course.
Basically three things -
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BCI - Brain Computer Interface. This can allow people with disabilities to control prosthetics using their brains. For example, this one from 20+ yrs ago. They are in clinical trial stages now - lot of data over 20yrs showing it's pretty safe. There are some differences like BrainGate uses "Utah" electrodes which sit on the brain rather than go inside the brain.
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Medical diagnosis - Some patients (with things like epilepsy) get their brains recorded like this to find the region of the brain that is malfunctioning. Then sometimes this region is removed and believe it or not it actually helps! Edit: DBS is another option sometimes like the other commenter said but that needs "stimulation" also, not just passive recording.
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Understanding the brain - these recording data can help make sense of the brain. We still don't understand much of how the brain works so this data can help and maybe help with treatments in the future.
For all of these currently we only have patients (because "healthy" people wouldn't want metal electrodes in their brain). But neuralink's promise is to make these electrodes so thin and dense (so that you can record more) while keeping SNR high that it might be possible to put it in healthy people without brain damage. I wouldn't hold my breath for that, though.
Do people think this is new? We have been able to do this for decades. I'm a lowly PhD student and even I get to work with humans whose brains we are actively recording from (although I don't put the electrodes in there myself).
Just another instance of Muskrat talking about things he doesn't know. I used to think he was a genius when he was talking about rockets, then he started talking about things I know (neuro & AI)...
35 now....
Wait why are they backing EVs?
Everyone originates from Africa.
Haha, meant to say exposé
That's.... I can work with that