Neurolink Announced First Human Subject to Receive its Brain Implant

As futuristic as this sounds, it's just the latest in a growing industry

Hiya!

If my years writing this newsletter have taught me anything, it’s that even though flying cars aren’t the norm, the future has arrived. Thanks to rapid technological advancements, scientists are making breakthroughs in nearly every field. Take today’s subject, for example.

Science-fiction movies like Avatar, The Matrix, and Ready Player One center around brain-computer interface technology, tech that links the brain with external devices. Well, now, such technology is science-nonfiction, and companies like Neuralink are already using it in human brains.

Neuralink

You’ve likely seen Neuralink, which Elon Musk co-founded in 2016, in the headlines recently. It’s because the company is developing a brain-computer interface system that decodes brain activity representing movement intention with the goal of helping people who are paralyzed use a keyboard or cursor with just their thoughts.

According to Neualink’s website, their current brain implant model, called N1, is about the size of a coin. The company says it uses 1,024 electrodes spread across 64 threads that extend into the user’s brain to record neural activity. The threads are so fine that only a surgical robot the company developed can install them.

Once implanted, the tech wirelessly communicates with a smartphone app and has a small battery that charges through the skin via a wireless (inductance) charger. N1 is cosmetically invisible and uses software to analyze brain activity and translate it into commands to operate external devices.

In May 2023, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave approval for Neuralink to begin recruiting paralyzed participants for their first human trials. Less than a year later, at the end of January 2024, Musk announced on X (formerly known as Twitter and another company Musk owns) that the first human patient had received a Neuralink implant. However, other details about the trials remained scant.

A Livestream video posted to X on March 20, 2024, was the first time the world was introduced to Neurolink’s first human patient to receive their implant.

The Patient