Neuralink Patient Zero

This piece, by Onno Berkan, was published on 09/24/24.  The original text, by Ben Guarino, was published in the Scientific American.

Neuralink implanted its first brain-computer interface (BCI) inside Noland Arbaugh, in January. The patient, who showed “promising neuron spike detection”, had a chip with over a thousand conductors threaded into his cerebral cortex.

Arbaugh had suffered a spinal cord injury while diving, which had paralyzed him from the neck down. Neuralink’s goal is to enable him to walk again, and Musk even dreams of a day when anyone with the Neuralink chip will be able to control a computer through an app that translates thoughts into text. Musk says he wants to “mesh human brains with artificial intelligence”, which seems to go past the company’s official aims of allowing people with quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs) to regain control.

According to Ryan Merkley, a BCI expert, Musk tends to “suggest big things and provide little detail”, and this may be a case of just that. Whether Neuralink will stray away from its current goals to focus on its founder’s ambitions is yet to be seen. 

It is also unclear what exactly Musk meant by ‘promising neuron spike detection’-- this may potentially refer to brain activity that would be expected from someone without Arbaugh’s disabilities occurring in his brain. For now, those are just promising words.

Merkey makes the point that, as Neuralink is a commercial entity with the goal of selling you stuff, these kinds of optimistic statements are great for the company. He also praises Musk, saying that Neuralink’s approach to their product is very ‘practical’, as they use Bluetooth to communicate information from and to the cortex. Merkey mentions that the device is unable to “pull apart every single neuron out of the whole mess”, but is able to get enough information through.

While information can get through to the outside, it is unclear if the Neuralink is able to put new information into the brain. We don’t know if the Neuralink can stimulate the brain to produce desirable activity; we just know that Musk has detected promising neuron spikes. 

The future for BCIs remains uncertain– they may just be signal amplifiers now, but could they become signal relay stations in the future? Merkey says that the future is impossible to predict, and makes the comparison to Oppenheimer: we’re about to set off a bomb– it will either be the end of the world or just a boom. We just don’t know.

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