by LIAM DREW
Elon Musk announced this week that his company’s brain implant has allowed a person to move a computer mouse with their mind.
The first person to receive a brain-monitoring device from neurotechnology company Neuralink can control a computer cursor with their mind, Elon Musk, the firm’s founder, revealed this week. But researchers say that this is not a major feat — and they are concerned about the secrecy around the device’s safety and performance.
The company is “only sharing the bits that they want us to know about”, says Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon specializing in implanted neurotechnology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “There’s a lot of concern in the community about that.”
Threads for thoughts
Musk announced on 29 January that Neuralink had implanted a brain–computer interface (BCI) into a human for the first time. Neuralink, which is headquartered in Fremont, California, is the third company to start long-term trials in humans.
Some implanted BCIs sit on the brain’s surface and record the average firing of populations of neurons, but Neuralink’s device, and at least two others, penetrates the brain to record the activity of individual neurons. Neuralink’s BCI contains 1,024 electrodes — many more than previous systems — arranged on innovative pliable threads.
The company has also produced a surgical robot for inserting its device. But it has not confirmed whether that system was used for the first human implant. Details about the first recipient are also scarce, although Neuralink’s volunteer recruitment brochure says that people with quadriplegia stemming from certain conditions “may qualify”.
Mind over mouse
This week, Musk said on Spaces — an audio component of his social-media platform X — that the volunteer “seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of” and “is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking”.
To researchers working on implanted neurotechnologies, this achievement is underwhelming.
“A human controlling a cursor is nothing new,” says Bolu Ajiboye, a BCI researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The first human to receive a long-term BCI implant controlled a cursor with it in 2004 ? and non-human primates have been doing so for even longer, explains Ajiboye.
Nature for more