Electrodes reduce tremor in Parkinson’s patients
Normally, the ‘globus pallidus’ brain area initiates body motions and makes them fluid, but in Parkinson’s patients, the area is impaired, causing tremors and non-fluid motions. Neuralink can improve the impaired brain area by providing a connection to the motor centre of the brain. The connection is a small chip located behind the ear, which captures the nerve signals from the motor centre that cause the tremor instructions. Subsequently, the chip stimulates the globus pallidus to make the motions from the motor centre more fluid.
occur when the mind travels back to a moment of trauma. The traumatic memory can be sufficient to activate the fear centre of the amygdala, so triggering an experience of the same intense feelings of horror and fear as had been created by the original trauma. But if the new technology were able to recognise the patterns produced by a traumatic memory as it materialised in the hippocampus, the brain chip might send electric impulses via tiny cables to the amygdala to make the centre of fear calm down before the main stress reaction is triggered. With the implanted electrodes sensing the arrival of the attack’s cause, the stress reaction and the PTSD attack could be moderated or prevented.
Tremor can be moderated
Even with only a limited resolution of electrodes, the microchip can in some cases pick up sufficient nerve signals to get a good idea of what is happening in the brain. Already in 2012, engineer Roman Genov from the University of Toronto in Canada showed that 64 electrodes in a rat brain were enough to predict an epileptic attack. The microchip could also react quickly enough to trigger stimulation of the part of the brain in which the attack was developing, and hence curb it. The engineer managed to prevent 80% of the rats from suffering epileptic attacks.
Scientists are now developing similar systems which could help patients with Parkinson’s disease. When the electrodes detect tremors in the motor centres of patients, the brain chip reacts by stimulating other brain centres in order to smooth out the tremor and make the motions more fluid.
The second half of this system, in which brain centres are stimulated to curb tremors, is already being successfully used by doctors to treat Parkinson’s. The method is known as deep brain stimulation, but currently the brain centres are over-treated, as they need to be stimulated all the time, whether the patient is trembling or not.
To avoid this, scientists need to be able to detect the tremor in the motor centre as it occurs, a sensitivity which requires an electrode density which has not been possible to achieve until Neuralink’s new, more refined technology.
Mind-control of robots
A brain chip could go beyond the correction of problems that manifest as diseases. The technology could also be used to allow patients and others to control robots by the power of thought.
In 2018, robotic engineer Christian Peñaloza from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan showed that a test subject could control a robotic arm at the same time as using his own two arms. That experiment used a kind of bathing cap lined with electrodes that picked up brain waves through the skull. Such an apparatus is far less sensitive than a brain chip paired with the 3000+ electrodes of Neuralink’s technology, each of which records individual nerve signals to provide far more detailed knowledge about what is going on in the human brain. More specific and detailed analysis of our minds’ thoughts could pave the way for more accurate and complex control of external systems. Success in mind- reading is the gateway to mind control.