Paralyzed Neuralink Patient Playing "Civilization VI" With His Mind

[pibbuR]

Paralyzed Neuralink Patient Playing "Civilization VI" With His Mind

A livestream by Neuralink on Wednesday introduces the public for the first time to the first human recipient of its brain implant.

futurism.com

If true it's certainly a step forward. If true.

pibbuR who isn't entirely convinced.

 

[Carnifex]

If true that's amazing. The sheer power of our minds is unmistakable.

 

[Redglyph]

It's impressive, but it's also terrifying that a company is authorized to do that (even more when it belongs to Musk).

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Did he allow the doctors to get such an implant ? Because if it had been done against his will, then it would have been unethical.

 

[pibbuR]

I can't imagine it being done against his will. I don't think he would spend his time playing games if it was. Besides, it's quite obvious from the text (and the picture) that he wanted it.

pibbuR

 

[pibbuR]

Another example of this technique:

Restoring sight to the blind with cutting-edge brain implants

Berna Gomez, a former science teacher from Spain, became a scientific subject herself in 2021. After being blind for 16 years, she took part in an experiment to restore her ability to perceive light.Gomez, then 57 years old, was fitted with an implant in the area of the brain responsible for...

projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu

There are a few limitations here.

Insufficient resolution. "To be able to discern a face or enough of the outlines of objects in the real world to navigate, say, a room, a blind person would need to have between 1 000 and 2 000 electrodes inserted surgically into the visual cortex. " I assume being able to read requires many more (Normal vision has a resolution of 1 million pixels)

The need for training. "The first blind people to receive a visual prosthetic in the brain, connected to an external camera, won’t suddenly have their vision fully restored, according to Janssen. That’s because the brain itself needs time after an implant to decode the message received from the camera."

Now, developing vision is done in cooperation of the eyes and the visual cortex. Infant brains are programmed to do this, but very likely loose it as time passes. So I think this technique will most of all benefit people not being born blind.

pibbuR whose vision has improved after his surgery.

PS. An example of how brain adapts more easily in the very young and then looses it is how we learn languages. The very young learn very efficiently and may even at the same time learn more than one language. This changes around the age of 12 (as I remember it), after that most people learn new languages by grinding vocabulary and grammar. DS.

 

[Redglyph]

I worked on this for a Ms Thesis, long ago. The objective was to stimulate the optical nerve instead of the brain, but it had similar challenges (not all are described in the article):

• Reduce the information contained in the image because of the bandwidth limitation (we could only have a rough grid of, say, (8 to 16 pixels)²). Just providing a subsampled image wouldn't work, you really need to process it in a special way.
• Find the best current curve: fast enough, exciting enough, but must induce a null total charge (or the nerve would slowly become charged and then start to oxidize, with disastrous consequences).
• Provide the power to the subcutaneous module (you don't want wires to pass through the skin, or burn the cells by transmitting too high a current through it).
• Map each pixel to the correct group of nerves (nerves don't necessarily have the same spatial structure as the image, if you look at a slice of the nerve).

This only works on people who lost their sight but had it long enough for the optical nerve to be functional, connected into the brain, and the visual cortex to be developed. I assume it's the same for the article above (at least for the last part).

I remember we were joking about Americans being crazy to directly stimulate the brain, and their authorities even crazier for authorizing it without an exhaustive study of the consequences. Well, there you have it.

It's a fascinating topic, on serveral levels. Something else which is also mind-boggling is how the brain processes text when we read. For example, there is no specialized organ, and this isn't something we're born with, yet the brain always comes up with the exact same organization of areas to do that (no matter the language, even when comparing people used to Chinese characters to people used to Latin-based ones) and the same shortcuts.