June 7, 2024
Source: Scientific American
Photo Source: Unsplash,
Retracting Threads
About a month following surgery, Arbaugh lost significant functionality in his implant. At first he thought it was a software bug, but the Neuralink team soon informed him it was a hardware problem. According to Arbaugh, Neuralink’s analysis of the electrode signals revealed that 85 percent of his implant threads had “retracted,” or moved out of position. Neuralink first publicly reported on the issue in a blog post on May 8, months after the setback was detected. (Neuralink did not respond to Scientific American’s questions about the thread retraction.)
“That was really hard to come to terms with,” Arbaugh says. “I was just sinking my teeth into it. I’d reached this high place. And after a month, it [felt like it] was all going to come crashing down.”
Weber notes that the possibility of such disappointment and anxiety is one of the “biggest risks” in human BCI research. “Imagine the stress of experiencing a spinal cord injury for the first time. Now imagine having to go through that again,” he says.
By tweaking the system’s algorithm to respond to the electrodes that were still transmitting data, Neuralink was able to restore much of his implant’s functionality, Arbaugh says. He’s since showed off his cursor prowess in video demos and says he’s back to breaking speed records. But some of the fixes have required creative solutions. The Neuralink engineers have created a system where Arbaugh makes a selection on a screen by hovering his cursor in place for 0.3 seconds instead of clicking. “We’re planning to go back to a single click where I initiate it,” he says. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Nor has the company released a formal scientific report on Arbaugh’s experience. That limits how much can be understood about the technology for now, says George Malliaras, an engineer leading the bioelectronics laboratory at the University of Cambridge. It’s not clear why or how far the threads retracted, if their position has continued to shift or if the remaining threads have stabilized, Malliaras notes. “We have to wait until papers are published with data,” he says.
In the meantime, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has green-lit Neuralink’s plans to move forward with the clinical trial and implant a second device in another person. The company will attempt to address the retraction issue by implanting the N1’s threads deeper than they were placed in Arbaugh’s case (eight millimeters vs three to five millimeters), as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a strategy worth testing, assuming it doesn’t change the safety profile,” Weber says. “They wouldn’t do it if the FDA didn’t think it was okay, so it’s got to be something that was already approved in their protocol. Hopefully it fixes the problem.”
Arbaugh, however, isn’t discouraged by the setback. In his view, everything he’s gone through has a purpose: to improve the technology for others. “The whole point of this study was to find out what does and doesn’t work,” he says. Each bit of information Neuralink collects adds to the pool of data that might one day enable some of the most ambitious goals of BCI researchers: restoring movement to paralyzed limbs or sight to the blind. “I try to keep my expectations pretty grounded,” he says. But the ground seems to be shifting rapidly in the BCI field. He’s happy to be among the first, and he’s excited for the next person to get something even better.
*Editor’s Note (6/7/24): This sentence was edited after posting to better clarify how Leigh Hochberg’s work on brain-computer interface has related to Neuralink and other companies.
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