Minds, muscles, and microchips

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A milestone for brain implant technology.

Elon Musk is best known for Tesla and Space X. But back in 2017, the tech billionaire unveiled a plan to develop technology for a very different kind of transportation: the flow of brain signals. Here’s Musk in 2019:

ELON MUSK: Whether it's an accident or congenital or any kind of brain related disorder or or a spinal disorder if you know somebody who's broken their neck or broken their spine we can solve that with a chip.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That chip is a wireless device. It’s about the size of a nickel, and it can pick up the signals sent between neurons in the brain. The surgically implanted device then routes those signals to receptors in other parts of the body. Think of it as you would a bluetooth connection pairing a phone with an audio speaker with no cable.

MUSK: Miraculous as it may sound, we're confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord.

REICHARD: And even people without neurological problems could benefit. Musk talked about the chip’s brain computer interface. We’ll refer to it later as the BCI. Musk explained that the BCI lets the user connect to a computer and do things like type messages or browse the web just by thinking about it!

EICHER: Well, last week Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink got one step closer to making it a reality when the FDA gave the green light to start human trials of the brain implant.

What could go wrong?

Joining us now to talk about it is Sumner Norman. He’s a researcher at the science think tank Convergent Research, specializing in brain-computer interfacing.

REICHARD: Good morning, Sumner.

SUMNER NORMAN: Good morning

REICHARD: Let’s get some context first. Can you give us a brief history of brain implant research and why it’s significant that Neuralink is getting FDA approval for human trials?

NORMAN: Yeah, sure the history of BCI is or brain computer interfaces actually goes back quite a long time, all the way back to the University of Washington in the 1960s, where they literally had a single monkey controlling a physical gauge using only his mind. And this is recording from a single neuron. It was in 2006, that John Donoghue’s group at Brown founded a group called BrainGate, which is still around today, they were the first ones to actually start installing these types of implants in humans. So we've been translating these BCIs to human users for a very long time. Most of that research has been based on older styles of technology, including the Utah Array, which is a 100 electrode array that we put into the brain. And that's what's been around for a couple of decades. Neuralink represents a pretty major jump forward, technologically speaking, moving from hundreds of electrodes to 1000s, or even 10s of 1000s in the near future. What isn't necessarily doing is driving the science for the sciences, they have been making a steady march for a very long time. It's a significant milestone for Neuralink to get access to human patients, and that's what they're going to get through this FDA early feasibility approval. But this isn't, to be very clear, a large scale clinical study the likes of which is going to go by quickly. This is really the first proofs of concept and humans. So to get to that place, it suggests that Neuralink has already developed some of the early animal studies that have shown promising results that the FDA is happy with that, that they've done some amount of initial safety assessment, and that that is enough of a burden of proof to say, Okay, this is worth testing in humans, because if and when it works, it could provide value to people, especially, as you mentioned before, for people who have severe forms of chronic paralysis, and in the near future, also vision disabilities.

REICHARD: I see a problem: what’s to keep people who understand these brain implants from controlling me? In other words, they know how this technology works to let my mind control technology. But those people could use the same technology to control me. What prevents that from happening?

NORMAN: Yeah, I first want to dispel a myth if I can, which is that BCIs are not mind reading. It's a highly willful and skillful act to use a BCI. And it requires a ton of concentration and a great deal of practice. And all of our patients that we've implanted before would attest to this. So they're not mind reading as much as they are a very advanced interface in the same way that a keyboard is an interface to your computer. So two is a BCI just a much better one, hopefully in the future.

REICHARD: So what kind of protections need to be put in place to protect people from the potentially dangerous impacts of brain computer interfaces?

Luckily, for now, we get a bit of a moratorium on this because the most effective BCIs are invasive. That means they require a medical intervention, a surgeon usually, and they're therefore subject to all of the regulations that implantable devices have to go through. So that helps us in the near term. But we still need to develop BCI specific principles to guide that development. Regulation will be a part of this down the line. It's probably a bit early now. But I would say that the Chilean constitution is maybe the first example of this where they've actually adopted specific neuro rights into their constitution. And I think that this can lay the groundwork for many others to start seeing how that type of regulation actually takes effect.

REICHARD: Sumner Norman is a scientist for the nonprofit organization Convergent Research. Sumner, thank you for your time today.

NORMAN: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

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