Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is looking for a volunteer for the first clinical trial of a brain implant
Musk wants to build a computer into the human brain that can transmit signals to other electronic media.
Musk is preparing to perform brain surgery on a human volunteer by Neuralink, which is looking for a volunteer who will agree to remove a piece of his skull in order to use a robot to insert a series of electrodes and ultra-thin wires into his brain.
When the robot is finished, the missing piece of the skull will be replaced with a computer the size of a quarter of a brain, which will remain in the robot for many years. It will read and analyze a person’s brain activity, and then the computer will transmit this information wirelessly to a laptop or tablet nearby.
Who can become a volunteer
The ideal candidate for the trial would be an adult under the age of 40 who has four limbs paralyzed. Such a patient would most likely have a Neuralink implant inserted in the so-called hand area of the promotor cortex, which controls the hands, wrists, and forearms.
The goal is to show that the device can safely collect useful data from that part of the patient’s brain, a key step in Neuralink’s attempts to turn human thoughts into a series of commands that a computer can understand.
- On December 1, 2022, Elon Musk announced that the chip would be tested on humans in about six months. Two years earlier, Musk’s company implanted its technology into a pig’s head, and a little more than 19 months later, into a monkey’s head.
- Elon Musk’s brain chip startup Neuralink announced on September 19 that it was starting human trials of a brain implant for patients with paralysis.
