June 7, 2024
Source: Scientific American
Photo Source: Unsplash,
Capturing neural activity can be like trying to record chitchat between two people in a packed stadium, says Douglas Weber, a mechanical engineer and neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University. To hear anything more than the crowd’s roar, you need to get up close with the person speaking. “The farther away from the speaker you are, the more mixed and muddled the conversations become,” he explains. Neuralink threads electrodes into the brain’s motion-controlling motor cortex, positioning “sensors right up next to the individual neurons that are conversing.”
Neuralink is not the first to do this. A device called the Utah Array—a tiny, rectangular grid of silicon spikes—is the standard electrode system for intracortical BCIs. It was developed by a University of Utah bioengineering professor, Richard Normann, in the 1990s; in 2004 Matthew Nagle was the first person to use a Utah Array BCI to control a cursor with his thoughts. Neuralink’s design, drawing on prior microwire research, is also not the first to replace the rigid Utah array with a network of thin, flexible threads that have electrodes along their length.
What Neuralink has done, however, is condense multiple advances into a single implantable, intracortical, wireless device. “They’ve kind of taken the best of everything that I’ve seen and put it all together,” says Jennifer Collinger, a biomedical engineer and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Data into Action
The Link’s circular electronic hub connects to 64 superfine threads that contain a total of 1,024 electrodes. That’s about 10 times as many electrodes as a Utah Array (though multiple Utah Arrays have been implanted into a single person’s brain at once). The Link transmits compressed neural data from the brain via Bluetooth, and an algorithm tuned to the user’s unique neural patterns translates those data into action.
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