You might find Netflix`s “Black Mirror” episode “The Entire History of You,” which features characters who are able to record and review all their memories with disastrous consequences come to mind in this one. Centi-Billionaire Elon Musk, a technology entrepreneur and philanthropist, with his startup company Neuralink on Friday revealed a pig named Gertrude which has a computer chip in his brain for two months, is being touted as the first step towards curing human diseases with the same type of implant.
This is the initial stage of development of San Francisco Bay Area-based Neuralink's effort to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces with thousands of electrodes to cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer`s, dementia and spinal cord injuries, and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.
"An implantable device can actually solve these problems," Musk said on a webcast Friday.
He said that the human trials for this ambitious project will start end of this year.
The first human trials will aim at treating paralysis or paraplegia focusing on a small number of human patients, the company`s head surgeon Dr. Matthew MacDougall said.
Musk also released a demo video called the "three little pigs demo" which showed the pig with a Neuralink implant eating off a stool and sniffing straw which set off spikes on a graph tracking the animal`s neural activity.
"a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," Musk said while describing Neuralink`s chip, adding that it is roughly 23 millimeters (0.9 inch) in diameter.
"Going from that to the fully implanted system in several pigs they showed is impressive and, I think, really highlights the strengths of having a large multidisciplinary team focused on this problem," Stanford University neuroscientist Sergey Stavisky said about the project.
However, researchers say that longer studies would be required to find out the longevity of the device. They say that it will held scientists better understand neurological diseases by reading brain waves.
