The first Neuralink implant in a human malfunctioned after several threads recording neural activity retracted from the brain, the Elon Musk-owned startup revealed Wednesday.
The threads retracted in the weeks following the surgery in late January that placed the Neuralink hardware in 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh’s brain, the company said in a blog post.
This reduced the number of effective electrodes and the ability of Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, to control a computer cursor with his brain.
“In response to this change, we modified the recording algorithm to be more sensitive to neural population signals, improved the techniques to translate these signals into cursor movements, and enhanced the user interface,” Neuralink said in the blog post.
The company said the adjustments resulted in a “rapid and sustained improvement” in bits-per-second, a measure of speed and accuracy of cursor control, surpassing Arbaugh’s initial performance.
While the problem doesn’t appear to pose a risk to Arbaugh’s safety, Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company has also told the Food and Drug Administration that it believes it has a solution for the issue that occurred with Arbaugh’s implant, the Journal reported.
The implant was placed just more than 100 days ago. In the blog post, the company touted Arbaugh’s ability to play online computer games, browse the internet, livestream and use other applications “all by controlling a cursor with his mind.”
Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant
This immediately sank when someone pointed out that it would be a PR nightmare, which naturally was more important than patient safety.
Not the first, first they told people about.
Definitely a closet full of dead bodies over there.
Dead monkeys and apes, yes. The bodycount in primates for the development of Neuralink isn’t… Fun.
When did they work? Prior to getting approved in humans they were killing animals at a high rate. To the point where animals were smashing their heads against shit to get the chip out.
Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.
I understand testing on animals is tough but this was straight cruelty.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
I’m not defending this, but at least a human electively chooses this procedure and understands why they have a device attached to their head. The monkeys must have had no idea what was going on and just wanted to remove the foreign object.
Very valid point.
I could argue that the person was mislead, thinking it was successful in animal trials when it wasn’t. Plus the mental manipulation on a person that is a paraplegic, having hope this will improve their life is sad. Musk falsely claimed it was safe and no monkeys died due to the implant.
When I was in college working in a lab, we were worried about accidentally killing frogs with our equipment because we didn’t have anything filed with the IRB about frogs.
Everything with Elon bewilders me. I thought this is why we had regulatory agencies.
This is also why regulatory agencies have been systematically crippled over the last 40 years or so. Damn near every sector has had their regulatory agencies crippled by some combination of reducing authority, underfunding, and understaffing. When the agencies work, the message is “see, we don’t need those regulations anymore because we’re taking care of things fine on our own,” and when they stop working, the message is “we shouldn’t be spending money on these agencies! They don’t do anything anyway!”
As we see most regulation agencies are underfunded and undermanned on purpose. I’m sure they are the same.
Ah but you see, that was when they were testing the Worker Attitude Modulation software. (Researchers called it WAM for short and vehemently denied any connection to the word Wham.)
It was working for a while for the guy. He was paralyzed from the neck down and he was able to use it to play some lame game like LoL or something.
Yeah I seen a money kinda play pong on it. It was cool and all but not ripping at your skull cool.
It sucks bc there are real companies developing the tech for an amazing cause. Elon is a dip shit that has no clue on how to run a company and he is actually hurting the research.
You don’t even need to be inserting probes to be able to do that…
OCZ had this ‘toy’ out in 2008.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16826100006
one of the reviews…
Ultra-sensitive, excellent response time. Partial hands free gaming. Cool looking blue LED glow from interface box. This is the future of computer user interface. While designed primarily for FPS games, works exceptionally well with MMOs. Makes Crysis WARHEAD and FarCry 2 a joy to play. As a disabled person, this unit has allowed me to game with all the “normal” folks on the same level.
This thing seems to be a later iteration of the Atari Mindlink idea from the 1980s, which presented the illusion of controlling the game with just your thoughts/brain waves/whatever but which was actually just reading the neuromuscular voltage from your forehead (meaning you scrunch your forehead muscles around to control it).
I still have this, but suspect it’s bricked after I’ve pressed the “do not press” button on the side. (i’m a filthy button pusher) If anybody has some firmware dumps or at least documentation, I’d appreciate it.
Never managed to use the brainwaves, but it was sensitive to the facial muscle movement. Good enough to play pong.
ok but the real interesting stuff like reading hand writing from a paralyzed person imagining writing it and etc are all only for actual electrodes in brains.
IIRC dude went home and played Civ all night
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monkey
mice
Can you read?
The implant failing when the subject’s connected tissue died has always been the best possible outcome from this, tbh.
I hope Noland has unlimited use because he might risk having to pay a sub to use the implant that they put in his brain
I would never put something in my brain that doesn’t at least have a public API documentation. If the company discontinued the product I want to be able to keep using it. Open Source software would be best.
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‘Have you consider running Linux on your neural implant?’
“I have a busted old brain from the 80s, what distro would you suggest?”
Open source is the only way for anything that should enter our brains.
Really hope regulations will come to this.
This was to be expected and they handled it well imo. I’m not gonna get one though.
I will never not post this. This is what anyone who gets one of these is destined for :
When a company stops supporting devices like this, the devices and their documentation and code should be required to enter the public domain. It should not be allowed for assistive devices to become e-waste stuck in a patient’s body.
Of course it is. The what neuralink is touting is the exact same situation that company was in. What happened there was they were creating an application for types of rare retinal blindness with the hopes that some other research would magically come along that makes it apply to other types of blindness and give them a market they could properly scale in. Surprise Surprise, no such deus ex machina occurred and the company could not see a path to profitability.
Neuralink is the exact same, cervical vertebra paralysis has less invasive adaptive mechanisms that are cheaper to implement, so there’s no way this will ever be a profitable approach with that alone. They’re hoping that this will magic into some brain machine interface without any actual hope that is going to happen.
The basic research just isn’t there to be doing this shit, but the investor dollars need to be put somewhere.
Agreed. I was flippant after reading the headline, since I don’t like Musk, but once I read the story I was like "oh yeah this tech does have big potential for the differently abled. "
A quadriplegic being able to control a cursor on a screen with the implant for 100 days seems like a legit first attempt.
Could be great for the accessibility movement in the long run. But I could be naive or too optimistic.
There are some politically correct terms that are not well liked by the people they describe:
- Differently abled
- Houseless
- Latinx
I cannot speak to any of these, however, I learned that that you should just ask. If you can’t ask, put the “human” first such as people with disabilities or people who are deaf, blind, etc. Latine is another term I’ve heard, but in the community, there are those that like it and those that don’t.
What you said is often true but not always. Some communities prefer person-first language, some prefer identity first language.
For example, generally speaking, “autistic people” is preferred over “people with autism”. The reasoning being “this is just part of who I am, it’s not an affliction that I have.”
I’m not autistic but I have lots of friends who are, and they all prefer to say “I’m autistic” rather than “I have autism”.
Like you said, it’s best to ask, or just copy the language that the person uses for themself.
A quadriplegic being able to control a cursor on a screen with the implant for 100 days seems like a legit first attempt.
Why, when we already have non-surgical solutions that allow the same thing but don’t come with the risk of killing you?
differently abled
Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭
Why
Why not? Nothing wrong with research and development as long as everyone participating in the test is an informed, consenting adult IMO. The advancements could make current accessibility tech even better. For one reason or another, a quadriplegic person decided they were willing to take the risk, so maybe they consider current accessibility tech for quadriplegics to be insufficient and wanted to try for something better?
Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭
Well damn, I didn’t know.
I get that there are better choices now, but let’s not pretend like a straw you blow into is the technological stopping point for limb-free computer control (sorry if that’s not actually the best option, it’s just the one I’m familiar with). There are plenty of things to trash talk Neuralink about without pretending this technology (or it’s future form) is meritless.
I feel like I’m going nuts, is eye controlled adaptive tech really that obscure? We’re not talking about maybe letting people walk again or giving them otherwise unattainable control over a computer, we’re talking about a different mouse input. The risks should be proportional to the gains.
Can you take a moment and imagine some possibilities of taking input directly from someone’s mind and applying it without needing to use your body? I know moving a mouse doesn’t seem impressive, but it demonstrates success at a technological concept that still seems impossible. I can’t speak for the ethics because I don’t know how voluntary the subjects are for the research, but this is very exciting for me, because it will inevitably become more sophisticated.
Cool, when you can upload your thoughts somewhere we’ll be having a different conversation about its risks and uses. But what’s happening right now is that they did brain surgery on a man to let him move a computer mouse.
Do you think we’ll get to that advanced level of use without experiments? And do you think that this is wrong despite consent to the procedure?
I agree with not liking ‘differently-abled’ as a term. To me it reads along the same lines as ‘disabled people are built different’. Pretty awkward.
Not that I have a horse in this race. Or a neuralink, as the case may be.
Yeah I feel like it’s an attempt to resolve the Deaf stance that deafness isn’t a disability. The general stance of the Deaf community is closer to that of the queer community than that of say the paraplegic community. It sees deafness as a disability constructed by a society unwilling to communicate visually and to teach signed languages to all people able to use them.
Mind you we’re the contentious portion of the disabled world. The Deaf are as bad as lesbians I tell ya.
But on point, “differently abled” feels like it washes away the struggle. I am disabled. I’m disabled by a society that taught my great grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents not to teach their hard of hearing children sign language because otherwise we won’t use English. I’m disabled by a society that doesn’t include visual signals in emergency sounds even when it’s easy to do. I’m disabled by a society where people, including cops, will speak to the back of my head and not even consider that I didn’t respond because I didn’t hear. And I’m disabled by the assumption my life has to be worse for having less sound as though I’m not extremely literate and completely capable of using a signed language. I’m not “differently abled” I’m completely able in most ways everyone else is, and people who can’t learn to communicate visually are just as disabled as people who can’t learn to communicate audibly.
That’s like saying blind people are not disabled, it’s just society that insists on visual stimuli
The deaf argument is that there’s no need for assistance of assistive tools. An all deaf town would experience no undue hardships unlike an all blind town.
I’m personally on the fence about it, but trust me when I write that we’ve seen whatever your gut instinct on this is before. Your gut take is just a hearing person speaking against Deaf theory written by Deaf people and the people far more involved in it are probably not going to see it because the Deaf don’t deal with the hearing as much as other disabled groups do, for obvious reasons.
How do people who have gained hearing feel about it? It seems like hearing would be important for a number of things besides communication, but maybe modern life doesn’t require much?
Deaf people and hard of hearing people may be more likely to be involved in car accidents
I know this is a point of some contention among the deaf community, but how do you feel about the development of a “standard” international sign? Personally, and I’m speaking as a fully hearing person, I think a basic international sign should be developed and taught to everyone. Not only to facilitate communication with the hard of hearing, but also in loud environments and with those who don’t share a spoken language.
It’s my understanding that a large portion of the deaf community is hostile to the idea of a universal sign from a cultural perspective, since each regional sign has cultural content. However I think it’s a potential solution for numerous issues, with more pros than cons.
You misunderstand language itself, not just sign language, if you think a universal language is possible or even a good thing
It would certainly be limited and rudimentary; I wouldn’t suggest a solution exists capable of any broad nuance. But gesture is a unique variety of communication, in that it can convey “innate” meaning in ways verbal language simply cannot, except in the case of onomatopoeia. Pointing is nearly universal, smiling is nearly universal, beckoning is nearly universal. Gesture is a spatial form of communication, centered around our primary means of material interaction with the world.
Grammar and syntax aside, I’d argue that it would be possible to assemble a vocabulary of universal concepts (eat, drink, sleep, travel, me, you, communicate, cooperate, come here, go away, etc). Certainly not a language for extended detailed conversation, but a codification and extension of gestures which are already nearly universal by virtue of their innate implications alone. Enough to communicate that you’re hungry, but not enough to send for takeout.
A universal language, at the level of any other sophisticated language, is obviously impossible. A formal codification of simple gestures to communicate at the most basic human concepts is much more doable.
My aunt and uncle are Deaf and contentious is pretty accurate.
I get why cochlear implants are shunned, but I don’t get why it’s such a hot button to even consider. We give paraplegics wheelchairs y’know
Because they kinda suck in a way wheelchairs don’t. Wheelchairs grant an alternative to ambulation. Cochlear implants give a new sense, one that those born without it literally don’t have the brain buildup to deal with. Like, look into those who got it and don’t use it. And often they’re forced on children by parents who will never learn sign language. I’m on board with children getting CIs as a teenager if a mental health professional with expertise in the deaf signs off that they weren’t unduly coerced, but it’s a major medical decision often forced or coerced on infants and young children by hearing parents and a hearing society to serve the interests of the hearing rather than the deaf child.
Fucking hell, hearing aids are uncomfortable. And not just because it’s something inside your ears. Like, it’s not the same as natural hearing (my loss is degenerative, I’ve had both). The sound filtration is worse and it overstimulates the brain. But hearing people get angry when you turn your ears off because you need a break because to many hearing people the point is to make you not deaf/hard of hearing. But the fact is we always are, it’s just that sometimes we’re using an assistive device that is often uncomfortable or outright painful.
Cochlear implants might be better seen as a lesbian having a platonic husband instead of a romantic wife. It’s uncomfortable assimilation and a worse solution in the absence of social pressure, and it gives the pressure ammunition. Absent the social pressures, it’s your choice. And to be upfront, I expect to get them once my hearing reaches the point they’re better than hearing aids. And also if I was a native signer they would have to earn a place in my skull and I’m angry that I’m not a native signer. As I implied, my hearing loss is genetic, and it fits pretty well to what your middle school taught you about a mono-allele dominant trait.
Wheelchairs are often seen as liberating to their users. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are often seen as burdens to their users. Nobody has to punish their child or nag their spouse into using their wheelchair, but for hearing devices, it’s common, it’s expected, it’s something you’re warned about beforehand. Please be understanding of the Deaf, we may not always be the nicest or easiest to understand, but nobody understands deafness better than us.
Actually in the wheelchair community, there can indeed be pressure to use the least assistive wheelchair possible. Chairs aren’t 100% seen as liberating and there’s a lot of nuance into why people pick certain chairs beyond finances. My aunt repeatedly fell out of her chair because she insisted on one made for a lower back injury than she has. She kept it for status, because she looks more able without the sides.
I guess ‘differently abled,’ just comes across as ableism to me. Not using visible signs of a disability, like a chair or hearing aids, can be internalized ableism. Some of the worst verbalized ableism I’ve heard has come from disabled communities. It’s a very complicated topic, not least because disability is used to harm disabled people and take away their agency. And for many, there is a lot of grief with using assisitive devices.
That being said, I don’t think people should be forced to change or to use devices they dislike. My aunt still uses her chair, it’s not like we’re going to drag her into another one or whatever. I just wanted to point out the internalized ableism that could be contributing to this attitude and word change.
It wasn’t so long ago that the Civil rights Era stopped disabled people from being chained in attics and lobotomized and hid away. It’s entirely reasonable to fear that association.
I mean people are surprised that autistic people dislike autism speaks
Had a class with some ABA techs who gave a presentation about Autism Speaks for their final project - they had no idea that criticism of AS/their entire field existed.
Seems to be a much faster interface with bigger bandwidth.
Is it worth risking dying to be able to move a mouse slightly faster than you can move your eyes and blink? If your answer to that is yes that’s your body, but I think it’s important to contextualize that the options here aren’t brain implant or nothing.
Because instead of a mouse cursor today, it could be a robotic leg or anything else tomorrow.
Being able to control electronics with the same ease we do our own body has so many benefits.
Except there are other companies working on this problem that don’t come with the baggage Musk brings with him.
One is even looking at using veins to insert the microchip.
https://www.massdevice.com/brain-computer-interface-bci-companies/
It’s the first attempt. Failure is gonna happen. This isn’t big news. If they were rolling it out to market that would be different.
damn, imagine we did any other medical research with that attitude!
Yeah that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in medicine for ever. Are you supposed to just stop trying?
so, hate to break it to you, but we in fact don’t take that attitude with medical research, anything that had a tendency to kill the pre human control groups generally doesn’t keep going, Musk can do this because he is a high profile case, ironically it’s how he slips regulations all the time, because there would be backlash from the musk sycophants, but also the general wealthy community who use people like musk as a barometer on how much corruption they can get away with
Maybe not now but a lot of what we know in medicine caused animals and people to die despite knowing the risks of experimentation
no, not really, that’s just a commonly believed myth
Wow. Tell that to all the dead people. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Anesthesia. Vaccines. More recently Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
ya, nothing was learned in the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”(see racist torture), Vaccines also didn’t one about because we just started injecting people with random shit, and we knew of Anesthesia for a long time, it just wasn’t seen as something you use in medicine in more recent history because of religious superstitions in medicine.
again, Myths, just like the idea that we learned anything from Mengele’s horrors
Sure failure is gonna happen but neuralink hasn’t been particularly successful with all the primates that have been tested with for previous version either.
This is an article saying it failed in a primate too!
Yeah it’s a really difficult problem. The criticism might be that it’s animal cruelty.
“Humanity can not progress without heaps” - Hubert Farnsworth
That’s weird. Did he try subscribing to Twitter Blue?
Was The Lawnmower Man a documentary?
That movie was so awful, even then. That and Battlefield Earth are guilty pleasures but they’re truly terrible.
I feel like they belong in separate categories though. Lawnmower man was regular bad, like it started as something that had value but effects and writing just weren’t up to where they should have been resulting in a hilarious, guilty pleasure mess.
Battlefield earth never stood a chance, everything about it was cursed start to finish and was a complete vanity project by a religious weirdo. There’s just plain guilt with it, no pleasure.
Calling him a religious weirdo gives too much credit to the cult/scam that scientology is. At best he’s a brainwashed cult member. I feel like 200 years from now people will be studying the rise and fall of scientology as it’s a fascinating case study of what happens when a scammer sets out to create a cult and actually succeeds. The fact he got away with it despite evidence that it was always intended as a scam is even more mind blowing.
The only thing remarkable about Scientology and Mormonism are that they were recent creations. That means we have fairly decent information about the founders. The other religions probably started similar ways but that has been obscured by time and poor documentation. The more people that get involved in steering them through the years, the more blurred it gets.
This is the most Omni Consumer Products situation.
shocked Pikachu face
This is more than enough to turn me off from the idea of neural anything in the brains of humans. Especially if it’s all being ran by a fledgling sycophant like Musk.
Even if it’s not drastic, I don’t want to know what the worst case scenario would’ve been.
Idk… I don’t like Elon, but this is actually incredibly huge overall. he controlled a computer with his mind. That’s amazing for people who could benefit from it. I think it’s worth continuing down this path, just to see how it evolves. I’m sure the man knew the risks and still chose to do it, meaning it was worth it to him.
This isn’t something new to nueralink. Brain-machine interfaces have existed for quite some time. Neuralink is one of a number of companies that are exploring directly implanting these devices rather than using an externally attached (hence, easily removable) interface, but the core thesis of “Brain control computer” isn’t any kind of grand leap forward. That’s just Musk’s marketing.
I saw a dude play chess with his mind where otherwise he couldn’t. I’ve never even heard of tech like this, so it’s 100% new to me lol
Just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t existed…
released in 2008
[I never said it didn’t exist but cool I guess.]
Is it because you are unfamiliar with adaptive tech? Eye tracking devices allowing quadriplegic people to interact with computers by looking at them and blinking have been around since at least the mid 00s. Like a decade ago the “mind reading” external tech got cheap enough for simplified toys to be made with it. Implanting it directly into the body is a lot of risk for very little benefit.
I just think it’s cool, but fuck me right?
If you think it’s cool I would hope you think it’s even cooler than you can do this without surgery and that there are literal cheap ass toys you can buy to play with yourself?
You’re presupposing that surgical implants can’t be more responsive, intuitive, speedy, or sophisticated than an external device. The eye trackers are very useful but objectively pretty limited. Non-invasive EEG is weak and distorted because there is skull and more brain in the way, so “resolution” is limited.
If better outcomes are possible by putting electrodes as close to the signal source as can be, why not explore that option?
Not the person you were responding too but I’d love to learn more about these toys/tech. Are there some key words that would help me search? I’m having some trouble sifting through the search results.
Hate Elon or love him, this is pretty cool honestly. I hope it succeeds.
And when it succeeds, next update will push ads directly in your brain.
Elon is just the face and money man.
Understand that, and kudos to all the great minds who made this thing a reality.
Nah this is a pretty dumb idea that is going to go poorly. It’s just techobros wishing we lived in a science fiction novel.
Everything’s “techbros living in a sci-fi novel”, until one day it isn’t.
I’m only 42 and I have seen very incredible advancements made in my lifetime that I never thought would be reality as a child. Handheld mobile communications devices that allow you to talk and share media instantly with anyone on the planet, for instance. That’s some literal Star Trek shit. Or the fact we now have the equivalent computing power of all the world’s supercomputers in the 80s put together on our desks. Or RNA vaccines, instead of using dead or dying viruses, we can now reprogram the body to make whatever antibodies it needs.
The USB-C set a new benchmark for the popular Apollo 11 comparison. With the release of the USB-C, your phone’s charger now is about 563x faster, can store about 75% more commands, and has about 2x the RAM vs the Apollo 11.
Maybe someday, but that’s not the point of the tech as it stands. It’s accessibility.
They guy who it failed in (Noland Arbaugh) is a full on quadriplegic. The ability to use a computer in a semi-normal way is absolutely beyond life changing for him.
How dare you state anything but “I hate Elon and he’s a POS and everything he does is bad”. Elon is a garbage human being and I dislike him just as much as the other person, but I’m still going to give credit when it’s due. This is a fucking cool idea and will help a lot of people.
But those options were available to him without a risky brain implant. There’s a large amount of alternative interface methods and tools available for these purposes, they just don’t have Musk’s marketing budget and they aren’t run by someone that owns a newspaper, so they’re not well known outside the disabled community.
We’ve had wearable (and thus removable and non invasive) neural interfaces for years now that have been able to do mouse control.
We’ve had robust eye tracker control since Steven fucking Hawking.
This is being framed as though this was the only way for this person to have these abilities and options available, and that is patently false.
Those alternatives are old tech that has way more limitations than a neural implant.
Just because there is old tech that SORT OF does this, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. That’s the same attitude behind “not needing more than 4mb of RAM” back in the day. You can’t stop progress all because YOU are fine with the current state of the tech.
I’m well aware of the existence of alternatives. But you must agree that what is achievable with an implant far outstrips the current alternatives?
Based on your reaction, I’d hate to hear your opinion on AI. Let me guess, its corpo data theft and only data theft?
What about the multitude of FOSS projects that even you could use if you wanted?
You are making a lot of assumptions
