US FDA approves Neuralink’s brain chip implant for second patient • FRANCE 24 English

US FDA approves Neuralink’s brain chip implant for second patient • FRANCE 24 English

now a startup called neuralink recently implanted a chip into the brain of a young quadriplegic man it was the first time the procedure had ever taken place but the company which is owned by Elon Musk has now been forced to Halt the trial so what went wrong let’s discuss that with Julia Seager Julia tell us first of all um what happened during this experiment so first of all uh neuralink has been working for several years now on this concept of an interface of brain machine interface uh to be able to compensate or even replace the cognitive uh functions that were lost due to either an accident or to a neurog degenerative disease so the idea is to restore Vision or restore Mobility so that’s in the short run now in the long run also they have this goal uh to enhance human intelligence uh to be able to compete as they say with a an AI if we’ll need it later on and I’ll get back to that in a second but how does it actually work well there’s a microchip in the of neurolink it’s called telepathy it’s the size of a coin and it’s going to be implemented directly inside the brain in a region that controls the movement in tension so uh at the top of the skull and uh additionally you’re going to have 3,000 micro electrodes that are going to be implanted directly on the neurons and they’re going to be able to decode and uh uh record neural signals so when you want to grab something let’s say with your right hand you have a very specific neural signal for that and what the chips can do is they can pick up on that send it through Bluetooth to a computer or a telephone decipher and act upon it so indeed it can help quadriplegic people in a big way because they can now control the computer from a distance now they were able to do it first with monkeys we all know about this experiment but let’s take a look at it again uh so this monkey had received an implant a neuro a neuralink implant and he’s play playing his favorite video game there with a joystick he’s also being giving a reward which is a banana smoothie and uh so he’s playing and at what point they’re going to disconnect altogether the joystick so get rid of it altogether and the monkey is going to keep on uh playing but with his mind only so just by looking at the screen and thinking about the next move he wants to make he’s actually moving uh um the video game so here you can see there’s no more joystick or anything he’s just looking at the screen and that’s happening so uh the thing is after several trials uh with animals the FDA did give uh their authorization for the very first human subject to get the the chip it happened this year in January the very first human subject was Nolan arbo a 29-year-old uh quadriplegic American and uh it was he was very enthusiastic again he was really able to regain some Aon autonomy he was able to play some of his favorite video games let’s just take a look at what happened the very first time he was able to control the computer from a distance just with his mind when I first actually moved the cursor with my mind it it blew my mind for like a whole day and to be helping to be able to be useful in some way it completely changed How I Live his reaction and his his Joy is just Priceless but several weeks later uh the company said that they had to stop the trial the reason why is because some of these little neuro uh neuro electrod actually retracted and it’s believed it’s because there was probably a little bit of air that was trapped in his skull during the operation right and do we know what the consequences might be well according to neuralink there won’t be any uh but it’s often said that neuralink is very secretive about uh the type of research that it does recently wired did an investigation and they re they revealed that uh some of the monkeys had severe neurological abnormalities but despite this the FDA did approve a second trial and the reason why is because these devices are very promising especially in the medical field as you just saw you have other agencies that are developing uh such interfaces like d for instance in the United States other universities as well and there are other types of devices also that are very impressive a little bit less invasive uh let’s talk about what the poly Technic School of loan is doing they were able to make a paraplegic man walk again uh thanks to a chip that they implemented in his lower spine and in his in his brain and the way they did it is that they created a bridge between his mind and his limbs so it’s very uh impressive indeed now the reason why neuralink often makes head lines is because they have this transhumanist ideology wanting to augment uh humans even humans who don’t actually need it who are who aren’t quad quadriplegic right uh and according to the company the possibilities of these chips are infinite so they’re even talking about the fact that we could perhaps one day upload or download information from our brains there’s also concerns about the fact that we could maybe be mentally hacked of course or even manipulated but uh so far we don’t know if that’s actually true but it would create an opening inside uh of our brain now this is actually a very cybernetic um vision of our brain and more and more science is actually showing that the brain doesn’t actually work like a computer it works and it it it learns in a very in a slower manner uh as we go through one experience to the other fascinating Julia sea thanks very much indeed

The US startup Neuralink, which recently implanted one of its chips into the brain of a young quadriplegic man for the first time, has been forced to halt the trial. The company, co-founded by Elon Musk, encountered issues just a few weeks after the operation but has already received FDA approval to find a second test subject. FRANCE 24’s Julia Sieger tells us more.

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