Chips implanted in brain will lead to medical breakthroughs

HOLD on to your hats, 2020 is going to be a year like no other.

For once we are not referring to political shenanigans, corruption, Brexit or blackouts. In the wings waiting for orders to take flight are tiny chips no bigger than half your thumbnail that will change the world we know, possibly forever. This chip has been developed to sit snugly in our brains, linking the brain with the hard drive of a physical computer without a wire. Would anyone be mad enough to slot a chip into a brain? Deep breath – yes they would.

His name is Elon Musk. This South African-born Canadian-American super scientist and former Pretoria schoolboy is pushing the boundaries of science. His company Neuralink has developed the biology that allows him to develop brain chips. He predicts that 2020 will be the year when brain-chip technology goes live.

The next question is what for? So that mankind can get a whole lot cleverer quicker is the answer.

Musk has been beavering away trying to figure out how to get chips into everyone’s brains. He says it’s time to prove to the world that brain chips work and that they have a pivotal role to play. “The time is right,” says Musk.

How does it work? In non-science terms it means that connecting points in the implanted chip are able, for the first time, to make direct contact with the brain’s memory neurons. These neurons, which science has only recently understood, are the ones that dictate how bright you are. Their job is to store knowledge, retrieve it and send out the right signals. The problem is that they are hidden away and not always easy to access, which makes being a super learner a bit of a hit-and-miss situation.

“But not any more,” says Musk. “We have the knowledge to create a link between man-made computers and the brain’s memory cells for the first time in our evolution. Ultimately we want to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. It’s the only way.”

In other words AI, says Musk, can’t work without human intervention. That’s good news because it means we won’t become obsolete or extinct.

Speeding up and refining the human learning process, he says, is what it is all about. It will allow, for example, a paralysed person to use the chip to achieve and perform certain movements. It will allow someone with an impaired memory to store information and retrieve it.

The big advance that has brought the first human-chip implant closer to reality is the development of flexible “threads”, considerably thinner than a human hair, which are less likely to damage the brain than the materials currently used in brain-machine interfaces.

During a recent Q&A at the end of a presentation, Musk revealed results that the rest of his research team hadn’t realised he would. But then that is Musk! “A monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain,” he told a stunned audience.

Does that mean that a surgeon has to open up the brain and insert the chip?

Musk and his team say surgery is not needed as the company has developed in tandem with the chip “a neurosurgical robot capable of inserting six threads (192 electrodes) per minute. The robot looks something like a cross between a microscope and a sewing machine. Because of its precision the robot also avoids blood vessels, which they believe will lessen any inflammatory response in the brain.

Musk is not alone in the chip revolution. This month University of Bath physicist Alain Nogaret described how the decoding of the bizarre behaviour of brain cells, opened the door to breathtaking advancements in science.

Presenting research in the December edition of Nature Communications,

Nogaret describes how once the decoding was done they were able to recreate them artificially in tiny computer chips.

“Our work is paradigm-changing because it provides a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail.”

These artificially created neurons, explains Nogaret could change the way we build medical devices because they are able to replicate healthy biological activity on a scale not possible before.

In their natural form neurons behave similarly to electrical circuits within the body, but their input and output electrical impulses are not predictable. These new artificial brain cells successfully mimic the behaviour of neurons.

“Until now neurons have been like black boxes, but we have managed to open the black box and peer inside.”

The ultimate goal, he explains is to use these neurons to build medical devices that can better cater to patients’ needs, like a smarter pacemaker that can respond to new stressors and demands on a person’s heart – essentially upgrading devices to be more in tune with the body.