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The Race to Put Brain Implants in People Is Heating Up

25Dec

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Technology

The Race to Put Brain Implants in People Is Heating Up

In September, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink announced the much-anticipated news that it would start recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to test its device. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it collects electrical activity from neurons and interprets those signals into commands to control an external device. While Musk has said he ultimately wants to merge humans with artificial intelligence, Neuralink’s initial aim is to enable paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with just their thoughts.Rival efforts to connect people’s brains to computers are also moving forward. This year, Neuralink competitor Synchron demonstrated the long-term safety of its implant in patients. Other startups tested novel devices in human subjects, while new ventures came ...

How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University o...

The Paradox of Listening to Our Bodies

My husband worries a lot about his heart. “I feel something right here,” he’ll say, pointing to a spot on his chest. I have a hard time knowing how to respond to these reports; unless I’m doing cardio, I’m never aware of my heartbeat, and even then I can’t really feel it. After my husband’s cardiologist told him that there was nothing wrong with his heart, I figured that his fascination with it was just melodrama, or hypochondria.Then I read a study by Sarah Garfinkel, a neuroscientist at University College London. Garfinkel monitored the heartbeats of twenty people who’d been diagnosed with autism, and also asked them to count the beats themselves. In a second study with sixty autistic individuals, she played a rhythmic, beeping tone and asked her subjects to say whether it was in synch ...