SIO440: Elon Musk's Neuralink - Real or Just Hype?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 440, I'm Thomas Smith. Got a cool two -parter here for you. So, may have seen in the headlines a year old who became quadriplegic after a diving accident is able to control a computer cursor just using his mind. I guess just using his mind and Neuralink, that would be the key. It's not just using his mind, that'd be magic. No, it's not magic, but it is pretty cool.

Cool, I even saw he's been playing Civilization 4, which is so cool, if this ever happened to me, that's what I would want to do. He's played, plays chess a little bit, um, cool technology, amazing stuff. Neuralink is an Elon Musk company, and if you have been paying attention to anything Elon Musk in the past ever, you know that it can't just be normal, like it can't just be like, like, oh, cool, a good company, doing a good job, making incremental progress by working hard.

Like there's always got to be something, like it's with this guy, it's never just like a normal thing. So what's going on? Is this revolutionary? How does it work? Well, coming guess, former neuroscientist, Dr. Jenessa Seymour, a perfect guest expert for this because, well, she'll talk about her credentials, but they're exactly right for this kind of thing. This was originally just going to be a one -parter, but it was so fascinating and there's so much to it, it went long. And I'll tell you why.

Jenessa takes us through this technology, how it works, how it doesn't work, how our brains or adjust when we face like a major injury like this. If something, you know, if you're to go blind, if you're to lose control of limbs, like major, major things that happen to your brain, what happens to those areas, regions of the brain that controlled that particular thing? If it's eyesight, if it's movement, whatever it might be, happens to that?

Kind of technology could be used to perhaps gain back capabilities that you lost, or maybe even gain new capabilities? What's the history of this? This, how long has this been going?

0:02:09 Thomas: Are they ahead of the curve, behind it? Also obviously all kinds of stuff going on with Neuralinks. So let's head on over to part one. After this break, which patrons at patreon.com/seriouspod will not have to hear, we'll get on over to that interview. By the way, join the Patreon. It's a great place to get extra content, no ads, sneak peeks of upcoming guests and topics. And we just had the hangout actually just today as I'm recording this intro. That was super fun. I love that hangout. Of of Codenames was played.

0:02:39 Thomas: Serious Pod. All right. After this break, we'll get to Jenessa. We're joined by Dr. Jenessa Seymour, back after coming on and helping us with some Where There's Woke earlier. Thanks for coming on Serious Inquiries Only.

0:02:51 Jenessa: Thank you for having me.

0:02:52 Thomas: Yeah, really interested in today's subject, Neuralink. You you remind listeners of your qualifications on this? I think they're pretty relevant.

0:03:01 Jenessa: Yeah, totally. So I have a bachelor's in psychology, a PhD in neuroscience. My specialty is sensory plasticity. So, you knows, if you were to become blind, what would your visual cortex start to do? If you were born deaf, what is your auditory cortex doing? So I studied that for a long time and now I've moved on. I work in disability rights.

0:03:28 Thomas: Excellent. But this is going to be interesting. Point is, you've got some good experience with stuff like this. So what, do you want to start? What is Neuralink? When did it start? How is Elon Musk involved?

0:03:39 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. So I figure I'll give you an overview of what is going on generally in the field and then what is doing on within Neuralink specifically. Do want to open with just a general caveat because I am going to raise some concerns and criticisms for what's going on lately. There are real people with disabilities receiving these implants and telling us, this has made my life better, and I am glad I did this. And I can say could possibly invalidate that. I'm so glad people have those choices. Spaces, you autonomy is so important and it has been taken away from people with disabilities far too often. Hope people will keep an open mind, listen when inevitably, as this tech is getting more popular, you're going to hear from people with disabilities who do not want this.

0:04:08 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm.

0:04:37 Jenessa: And and I think a lot of people are going to have a hard time understanding that. But maybe I can add some nuance today that will make it make a little more sense that is a little more complicated than it sounds. I guess let's talk about what is a brain implant and how does it work?

0:04:54 Thomas: Make your brain look curvier, more seductive. I considered it. But yeah. Oh,

0:04:59 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. Today it's not exactly commercially available. You might hear this called a brain computer interface, BCI, or brain machine interface, BMI. It's been around for a long time. Those terms don't have to refer to implanted tech. So we start with just how your brain is working?

0:05:29 Jenessa: Yeah. It's doing a lot of stuff and we don't understand most of it, but but yeah, yeah.

0:05:28 Thomas: Gosh, good luck, Amen. Just podcasting and editing, though, really. That's all mine does.

0:05:41 Jenessa: I feel like mine is just like 90% like about brain stuff and loss stuff. And then it's like, why am I so hungry? I feel you. Have heard this phrase, fire together, wire together.

0:05:59 Thomas: No.

0:05:59 Jenessa: It's repeated a lot in like neuroscience classes. So psych and neuro people might have hurt that. Idea is, you OK, you've got a lot of experience. You're a baby. You've got the ability to connect with a ton of neurons, but you've just entered the world and you don't know how to connect things up. What is related? What isn't related? What do I do with all these neurons? And way your system is going to organize is that principle. If neurons are correlated in their firing, they're going to strengthen their connection. And if they're not correlated, they're gonna disconnect. So, you know, apples are red, apples don't bark. So neurons that are processing the visuals of the shape of an apple and the color red are going to to strengthen their connection to each other, and when you first see a green apple, oh, that's very interesting, that's not correlated. Before, um, the dog barking and the red apple, like, the why would that be connected, doesn't really have anything to do with each other, right.

0:06:59 Thomas: So it's Just like building connections, building intuitions a little bit. Well,

0:07:00 Jenessa: Yeah. Exactly. So, like, you'll see that developmentally as you watch a kid learn, and that's happening in the brain too. Uh, the, the psychology and the neuroscience, they are paralleling each other really well. Um.

0:07:16 Thomas: Yeah, they would have to be. Otherwise, Something's Wrong.

0:07:18 Jenessa: Exactly, it's It's like it seems Yeah. It seems strange to people at first when you explain it like that, or it might seem like, whoa, but like if you think about it, of course. Um,

0:07:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:07:29 Thomas: You're Just describing sort of the hardware version of what the software is doing, in a way, right? Yeah.

0:07:29 Jenessa: Exactly. Exactly, yes. And so really all that's unique about, like, a brain versus a computer is the hardware in the brain can change. Uh, Not just the software, you're updating your hardware too. Do these cells are correlated, they're firing together, and they are wiring together. Way to think of it would be like hand -eye coordination. So I move my arm, and I have all kinds of brain areas that are processing that motion, and I see my arm move, I see a ball moving, moving towards my hand.

When the ball hits my hand, I feel it hit my hand and I see it hit my hand at the same time, and I can grasp it, and the motor neurons are moving to grasp it. And I see my fingers move. All of these are firing together and connecting up. You're going to develop that coordination. You start out as a baby with just random movements, and eventually you will get to voluntary movements, choosing to reach out and grab things, that kind of thing.

Say you become a quadriplegic. Got this motor cortex that used to do stuff. It used to move your limbs and it doesn't anymore. What's it going to do? This case, the idea would be, we're going to put a chip there and we're going to pick up the firing of those neurons. I'll use the example for what Neuralink has just demonstrated very recently. A cursor with your mind. Hook that up to the computer. How the heck is that possible? Way they'll often describe it is like, I don't even know, man. I just think about it, and the cursor moves. That's

0:07:44 Thomas: So They don't know how they're doing it.

0:09:19 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. The experience is totally unconscious. I Up, and it goes up, and yeah, totally.

0:09:19 Thomas: Wow. How?

0:09:30 Thomas: Do they develop that? Because seems weird that, like, there has to be some way it trains on that, but you would think whatever, whatever it trained on would be the way of thinking about it, that what that is. Great, I don't understand.

0:09:42 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah! So what's cool is it's not the machine training you, it's you training the machine. So, think of it, just like the hand-eye coordination, um, your neurons aren't like, quote-unquote, aren't doing anything, they're not static, they have a baseline firing rate, so we put the electrodes in there, they just passively measure the electricity, they're doing anything, and they send that signal off to the computer, computer. What's cool is you don't have to set it up to be like, oh, this part's going to move it diagonally to the right and this part is going to move it diagonal to the left.

0:10:18 Thomas: Yeah. That's, that's what seems crazy.

0:10:21 Jenessa: Yeah. You just have it set to be, like, just start moving and you have the person look at it, just watch. It's going start moving because the neurons are firing. But at first it's going be random because the neuron are firing randomly. But if you're watching and it goes up and to the the right a little bit. You're going to be like, huh. Consciously, I don't know what neuron in my motor cortex fired.

0:10:48 Jenessa: That means nothing, right? But fire together, wire together. Your neurons in your visual cortex saw it move and there were motor neurons that were firing at the same time.

0:10:35 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, so just to clarify, are you saying this is how Neuralink works or this is out like any of these things work?

0:11:06 Jenessa: This is how any of these things work. This was one example of how you can train this up so Essentially, at first it's just kind of barely moving, randomly moving, and could be a little frustration at first of just like, "I don't know, man, I'm just staring at like a randomly moving thing." But eventually what will start to happen is this sense of like, "Oh, I almost feel feel like I have a little bit of control over this thing." And eventually we- mechanism is, yeah, it must be you're looking at it and this visual area and this motor area, the way that I can coordinate my hand eye coordination, I have hand cursor coordination. Yeah.

0:11:09 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. Interesting.

0:11:51 Thomas: Right. But this requires some setup, some default setup, some programming of what it's looking at in your brain, right? Right. Like must be some default setting for this thing. Right. Don't understand how is it looking at the entire brain and just like algorithmically trying to. I don't understand. This seems weird.

0:12:10 Jenessa: So, um, now the chips are very small, they kind of have to be. I'll get into more of like the tech of how- how exactly, like, you, how do I put this into your brain without like just instantly murdering you?

0:12:21 Thomas: So it's is it where it isn't. Sorry, I didn't, I mean, I might have completely missed that. How what is this? What is this doing?

0:12:25 Jenessa: This different variations on it, but they're, the end of the day, it's almost always needles in the motor cortex.

0:12:34 Thomas: Like, OK, gotcha.

0:12:36 Jenessa: So we put electrodes, usually in the form of little needles. Sometimes it could be little surface electrodes that don't work as well. Um, they pick up the electrical activity in the neurons, so. I guess one way to think of it is, if you, let's say you're not quadriplegic, you are a person with two arms, uh, your arms are working just fine, you've always had them, um, could measure over your motor cortex, um, could put, you know, I wouldn't, but I could put a needle into your motor vortex and I could measure, noticeably, oh, when you move your arm, this area fires. And if I could stimulate that, and we can do this non -invasively with like a little magnetic pulse, if I stimulate that your arm will jerk upwards.

0:12:46 Thomas: Hmm. OK. Okay.

0:13:27 Thomas: Crazy.

0:13:27 Jenessa: I go over sensory, somatosensory body touch areas, if I could I could measure it. I could tell that your arm is being touched. And if I stimulated it magnetically, you would feel your arm being touched, even though nothing was touching it. Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah,

0:13:47 Thomas: That's like, so we're doing the matrix stuff eventually.

0:13:50 Jenessa: Yeah! Yeah, know, if I were to stimulate your visual cortex right now, you'll see something. We call it a phosphine, little flashes of light. And essentially, the way to think of it is, if your visual cortex is firing, your brain has no way of knowing why. Like, maybe that's because has a photon hit my eye. Or maybe that's, who knows, my visual cortex is firing, I must have seen something. And so you will see something. That would go for any sensory area of your body, uh, or of your brain, sorry. Um. Any sensory brain area, if, if it is firing you will experience that sensory thing, um, and if it's firing randomly you're just hallucinating it, um.

0:14:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:40 Jenessa: Hopefully it's coming from an external stimulus, yeah.

0:14:43 Thomas: But there's got so, to be obviously so many little of detail there, right? I mean, we can, we the baseline, you of pixels, what's the baseline for it, nerve endings in that maps to like a neuron, you know, like there's got to be some base level thing and then and combinations of that would yield different sensory things for us, right? Yeah.

0:14:58 Jenessa: Absolutely. So, like, um, we're talking like natural vision, normal, everything's going the way it's supposed to. Got your rods and cones in your eye. Photon hits it. It gets stimulated. It's going to send that back through a number of subcortical structures, which, usually firing below the cortex, you're not going to be conscious of. But when it reaches the cortex, the wrinkly part, the part that people think of when they picture a brain, that's when you can become consciously aware of it. A little bit of an oversimplification, but more or less that's going to hold up. And in your central vision, your most precise detailed vision, you can have one cone, your Central Vision map all the way through to, like, yeah, one tiny little area in your visual cortex because it's retaining that spatial detail. In your periphery, a whole bunch of rods are going to sum together to activate an area in your visual cortex because we're trying to get as much light sensitivity as possible. That's why your periphery is all blurry. Is that kind of answering the question you were asking?

0:16:15 Thomas: I was thinking in terms of like touch and stuff though too, it's kind of interesting, but

0:16:16 Jenessa: Mm hmm. So you have like a body map in your somatosensory in your motor cortex. They roughly match up in where they're mapped. They're kind of parallel to each other on the brain. And so you can map out like, yeah, this is where my arm is, where my hand is. But they're not proportionate to the size of your body. They'RE proportionate to the sensitivity you need. So your back is, you a very large part of your body, but it doesn't get a lot of representation because you don't need like dexterous sensitivity in your back muscles. Your hands take up so much space in your brain because you need lots of little sensitive touch discrimination in your finger pads. And you need little dexterious movements in the joints in your fingers to pick stuff up and move things and manipulate things, um, they take up physically more space in the brain.

0:17:15 Thomas: And That's something that I'm sure could change based on if you're born differently, or and there's got to be a certain extent to which you could change even as an adult, right? Like if something changes and, yeah, neuroplasticity is crazy.

0:17:19 Jenessa: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So, like, for example, um, violin players, the hand they use to touch the strings, those two fingers that they use most often will get way more representation, representation than the other fingers.

0:17:40 Thomas: Yeah, it's brain is gerrymandered, I get it, yeah. Abolish the brain senate. Every place of the body should have equal rights now. That's not, that wouldn't be good.

0:17:44 Jenessa: Yeah, exactly. Um. Yeah, so if you use it more, it will, it's very flexible, that's what neuroplasticity is, plastic, flexible, um. Really what this is all going to capitalize on, if, if you were like born with it all locked in, you know, here's all the neurons and exactly what they do and they represent this spot and only this spot, well, then you couldn't learn anything and you couldn't change that, you would be 100% reflex, um.

0:18:18 Thomas: Yeah, interesting.

0:18:20 Jenessa: This technology wouldn't work, um, guess in theory I could like trigger all those little reflexes if I could get a needle into every single neuron on, um, it would also be really boring, you'd be like a little cockroach, I guess, um, in a human, um, I don't have to get, know, let's try to get an needle in right where it used to represent this part of your finger that used to click a mouse, and then make you think about clicking, we, we don't have to do that. Your brain will figure it out.

0:18:50 Thomas: Crazy, yeah.

0:18:51 Jenessa: Yeah, it's, it is truly awe -inspiring when you really think about it and when you watch it happen, the way that brains can adapt. Know, my specialty is, without any of these implants, just watching people do it all on their own. Basically that's what we expect is going to happen and what we do see demonstrated happening, happening, um. Can even see it in people, uh, without an implant, if we put an EEG cap on, uh, outside of your head, no surgery, no nothing, uh, can learn to control a cursor that way as well, um, they don't get as fine of control, but they can do it, yes.

0:19:22 Thomas: Yeah. So it's a question of like just resolution essentially, like accuracy of what you're picking up and, and like the amount of detail, because, yeah, something like that, because that's been around for a long time, right? Like some level of measuring, but it's, if it's not measuring in fine detail enough, you're not going to be able to, you, something to the degree of accuracy maybe that you'd need to.

0:19:38 Jenessa: Yeah. Exactly, uh, because we have an issue with EEG where the electrical signal coming from the brain, it gets, that's distorted by the tissues on top of the brain, the skull, the scalp. It all distorts the signal.

0:19:59 Thomas: Right. Is it like stuff in the center of the brain going to be kind of harder to get like detail on just because of pure?

0:20:06 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. The stuff in the center of the grain will actually not even, on EEG, it won't even make it up to the surface in a detectable way. So EEG is primarily going to be focused on those surface wrinkles, which, you know, if if you're like cognitive neuroscientist, and you're thinking about human conscious behaviors, like that's fine. That's all I care about. Right. But, you know, the center of your brain kind of matters. Do need that center part of your grain.

0:20:06 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Oh, Yeah.

0:20:36 Jenessa: But I ignore it most of the time.

0:20:38 Thomas: I need All my brain. I like all my brains. Keep it

0:20:40 Jenessa: Yes, you definitely use more than 10 % of it, you're using 100% of it. You just not using 100% of it 100% of the time, that would be a seizure. The basic concept. We're going to, for the implanted version specifically, get onto the exposed surface of the brain, put these needles in. Usually if we're talking about somebody who is quadriplegic, we're going into the motor cortex because we know it's a vacant lot, but the lights are on, the neurons are firing and put the needles in, measure that baseline firing, have that signal coming out, have this person watch the cursor respond to that random firing and the inherent nature of neuroplasticity, it will become non -random. They will learn to control it. It

0:20:42 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:21:31 Thomas: It's So interesting, it's like just anything that your brain can control, it will find a way because it'll start making associations, kind of, yeah.

0:21:42 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, uh, really good at that. It is so good at pattern forming that it makes patterns out of things that don't have patterns and then we have conspiracy theories and superstitions. Um, on the sensory end of things, it's, it's quite good at adapting that way and and figuring it out. Um, there's your, your implant, um, overall concept, um, has been going on for a while. Um, do you want to jump into, like, what is neural link up to specifically? Oh,

0:21:49 Thomas: Sure.

0:22:11 Thomas: Um, was curious, like, if you don't have a implant and you, you lose some part of your body, does that, that area of the brain eventually just get repurposed, or what happens there?

0:22:22 Jenessa: Man, okay, this is my whole thing, um.

0:22:25 Thomas: Okay. If that's too big of a topic, then we can take it.

0:22:28 Jenessa: Uh, give you the, like, shortest version. And actually, I think this is related because it's part of the reason that I, a concern I would raise. So one, you're blind or you become blind, your visual cortex does not atrophy and die, which is what we would expect for a brain area that's doing nothing because it's very energetically expensive. It's consuming oxygen and glucose way more than the rest of your body. If you're not using it, you should get rid of it. But you don't. So you must be using it for something. Of the things we'll see is people using it for echolocation. So right now, you, a sighted person, if I were to flash a light in your upper right visual field, bottom left visual cortex would fire. Blind Blind people, particularly blind people who are practiced at this, if I were to make a sound in the upper right of a room, their bottom left visual cortex will fire the same way. Like they have an auditory map of the world instead of a visual map of the world.

0:22:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:38 Thomas: And wouldn't we all have that to some degree though? I mean, that's gotta be kind of useful, right? Or do we just, it's just with when you're sighted, your eyes just take over and you don't really listen to that part. You don't really form that kind of connection.

0:23:50 Jenessa: So you definitely, everybody has, like, audio-visual integration areas, areas. Normally, typically, you, consensus in the field, that's a different brain area. Argue, and of course, I think I'm right, that the visual cortex appears to, even in a sighted person, have maintained these connections structurally. In fact, it must have, because when we see a sighted adult learn to do this, they can't be growing brand new neurons and giant connections. Adult brains don't really do that. It has to be there structurally and just be unmasked functionally. Um, I would agree with you, of course it must be there, right? Um, just makes sense. Uh, yeah, there's, like, the structural plasticity that that kids, uh, are doing where their brain is, like, physically changing so much, cutting and growing connections. In adults, we think of more functional plasticity. The the physical structure is mostly going to stay where it is, but what those structures do, and strengthening or weakening their connections, that's going to change quite a bit. Taught, like, a whole semester course on this stuff, I could talk about this all day.

0:25:14 Thomas: So long story Short, or it's not, it's not as though a part of your brain just, like, dies.

0:25:15 Jenessa: For Sure. Exactly. I, actual damage to the brain, um, don't know that we see that at all, really. The

0:25:25 Thomas: Yeah, that's what, it just kind of eventually gets repurposed, or I guess it just gets unused.

0:25:30 Jenessa: I guess that's the thing, is if, if it was truly unused, it should die off. If it went for extended periods of time doing nothing, yes, you would expect it to die. It would atrophy. Is the word we would use.

0:25:44 Thomas: What Would it Mean To Die Yeah. Atrophy, huh, okay.

0:25:47 Jenessa: It just doesn't seem like the brain does that. At least the brain areas I study, they rapidly start doing other things. There was one study that within five days of blindfolding, sighted adults showed tactile activity in the visual cortex. Also hallucinate like crazy, which is a whole other topic. It's really incredible what the brain is capable of doing.

0:25:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I Remember, like, when you go on a school field trip to, like, a cavern, they always say, like, oh, there's some, some guy got stuck in here, or they do experiments, and, like, within a few days, no, like, they're always, it's part of it, they're like, within a few days, you, you start seeing stuff. It's like pitch black.

0:26:29 Jenessa: Wait, really? I've never been to a cave, so I don't...

0:26:30 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, really? Maybe that's just a, yeah, a regional thing. But where from, there's a bunch of those around. So I went on several school trips and there's always that some bullshit. No, it's not bullshit, actually. There's always some story of either when somebody got stuck down there or when they like people voluntarily, you do experiments of like staying down. You also those those ones that I'm sure you've heard of it with like sense of time and other stuff.

0:26:36 Jenessa: Oh, wow. Mm -hmm.

0:26:56 Thomas: Um, but yeah, no, they, they say that like you start seeing stuff within a certain number of days. And I think it must be that same thing. I would think, I mean, if blindfolding does it, then,

0:27:04 Jenessa: Yes. No, I'm sure it's the same mechanism. And what's so fascinating is, so you ask people who lose their vision later in life, hey, is this happening to you? Estimates of what percent of people get this hallucination. The estimates range anywhere from 0.6% to 67%. And it depends on how you ask the question. If you frame it as, hey, this is common and this is normal, and it does not mean you're losing your mind, um, just a physiological thing that happens to some people as they lose their vision, they get visual hallucinations, is that happening to you, all of a sudden everybody's like, yeah, it's bad. So, so interesting to me that, like, that was like a normal childhood experience for you to have heard that story and, like, I know, I've never, I was not exposed to this until I I started studying it, uh, that, like, actually this is, this is normal.

0:27:26 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I, yeah, I want to clarify. They didn't say like you see full visions of people and sugar plum fairies and whatever. It's just, it's just like, flashes um, of light and other things, you know, stuff like that.

0:28:11 Jenessa: Yeah. So it starts that way.

0:28:14 Thomas: Yeah. And then the demons come. Yeah, I get it.

0:28:15 Jenessa: Um, yes. Charles Bonnet syndrome, uh faces is a common hallucination. Um, it's fascinating. Um, seems correlated with firing of the areas of the brain that process faces, um, picturing a face you've never seen before is kind of hard, it seems like they come out all distorted and weird looking when it's abnormal firing. Yeah.

0:28:23 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. Does our brain just really want to be seeing faces? It's like super used to that. Yeah.

0:28:46 Jenessa: It seems like this brain area that used to, all these visual brain areas, they used to see stuff, and now, um, got a whole theory that one of these days I'm going to finally um cure my ADD and publish a paper, um, has been sitting in my filing cabinet for the longest time, um, we have all these people, they lose their vision, they hallucinate, and then, uh, hallucinations calm down and the visual cortex starts processing sound and touch instead, and I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's part of it, um, we see the deprivation happens, and first, of course, just like if you close your eyes your visual cortex will fire less, but if you close them long enough with a blindfold perhaps, um, starts firing like crazy, and we'll see the hallucinations connected to that really high firing rate, and, uh, it waves out through the visual system, the halluculations get more complex.

And then it calms back down and it turns from random hallucinatory firing to this structured firing. And I got a whole idea about serotonin being involved and, you know, why that's connected to LSD targeting serotonin receptors. I could literally talk

0:28:52 Thomas: Yeah. Okay.

0:30:01 Jenessa: About this all day.

0:30:02 Thomas: Yeah. Back to Neuralink. Okay.

0:30:05 Jenessa: What is NeuralINK up to? Been doing these brain -computer interfaces. Recollecting this correctly, because I was graduating from my neuro PhD in 2016, there was like this percolating story that maybe there was going to be Elon Musk opening a neuroscience thingy. You were talking about this on the episode the other day about the Twitter thing, like once upon a time, he had a good reputation.

0:30:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:36 Jenessa: And at the time, there but for the grace of God go I, I thought about applying to this company, I might have actually done it. I can't remember that's going on in 2016. 2017, he acquires the trademark name Neuralink and then finally goes public with it. 2019, we're going to see more announcements about some of the data, some of what they've got, and they're going going to get like uh funding more than just what uh Musk is putting into it, and at that point, pretty much the people who currently work there will stop publishing their data in scientific journals. And one of the quotes from 2019, uh, Max Hodak, the president, said, "We want this burden of stealth mode off of us so we can keep building and doing things like normal people, such" as publish papers.

0:31:30 Jenessa: I think what was probably happening is wanting patent things. So, some logic to it. The problem is science by press release is the terminology a lot of people started using. Like, this is concerning. You want to put this inside a a human brain, and you're not telling people what you're doing. Uh -oh. All very concerned. Nobody's quite sure what you'RE up to. Uh oh. In 2024, the first human gets an implant from Neuralink. They have a type of approval from the FDA called early feasibility studies, they are not required to publish that data on the FDA's website when they have that type of approval. We also still don't know what is inside of this man's brain.

0:31:27 Thomas: Of stone huh yeah it make sense as a company yeah yeah Okay. So it's this tricky thing where it's like, we want some level of transparency, obviously for regulation, for safety, for all that stuff. Human experimentation permission, all that stuff. But then the conflict is, yeah, but we're a company and we can't, know, you we don't want to tell everybody what we're doing because then we lose, competitive you edge or something, which seems kind of reasonable. So is that kind of the tension that's going on here? Here?

0:32:43 Jenessa: Yeah, think That must be. The thing is, because companies that are doing this seem to be not as secret about it, um, I think some of the reason for that is gonna come out, um, much do you want me to talk about, uh, violations? The Animal Welfare Act,

0:32:56 Thomas: Hmm. I was going to mention that. I mean, I think people have maybe heard about the fact that Elon Musk has killed a bunch of what monkeys. Is it? Monkeys or

0:33:04 Jenessa: Yeah. And sheep and pigs. And yeah. Reason I think that it is important to talk about this is, um, first of all, of course these animals' lives matter, um, also these are the people who are going to do surgery on a human too, um, and I, I think it probably matters how they treat an animal, um, is just non -stop controversy about how they are, are treating their animals, um, animals died, um, did find it a little surprising that people were surprised about that because I'm not quite sure what people thought was gonna happen, like,

0:33:26 Thomas: Uh, I, Yeah. Yeah,

0:33:44 Jenessa: These Monkeys don't get a brain implant and yeah.

0:33:44 Thomas: Animals would just be gaming. Yeah they'd just be right.

0:33:48 Jenessa: They don't, they don't run off into the forest after this, right? Like, I'm sorry to tell everyone that this is how animal research ends, however, um, have had the rough estimate, because they are not keeping proper data, according to anonymous sources within the company, about 1,500 animals have died since 2018.

0:33:52 Thomas: Oh

0:34:13 Jenessa: A competitor got FDA approval to do human studies in 2021. They started their animal studies in 2016 and approximately 80 sheep died in that time period. Yeah.

0:34:25 Thomas: Man, I've got real real bad news about factory farming. If anyone seems to be concerned, are we going to do a thing where as a society we're like, I can't believe you killed sheep. And then they're like but we also kill sheep to eat that like people eat sheep like I don't.

0:34:39 Jenessa: Yeah. That's the thing, is like, so if you're opposed to all animal research unequivocally, then obviously you just find all of this unacceptable, right, um, if you think that at least some animal research is necessary or worth it. Is going on at Neuralink is allegedly, uh, that it is not ethical. Um.

0:34:47 Thomas: Yeah, I'm not.

0:35:00 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, and I don't mean to dismiss that, like, yeah, I would invite people to try to be a little consistent about that, but obviously, There's going to be ways that are, you know, I, I could see being acceptable levels of animal experimentation for, return, you, of suffering of humans potentially. But there's like, going to be better and worse ways to do that.

0:35:03 Jenessa: Of course. Yes, Exactly. Exactly. So we have the Institutional Review Board, or IRB, that regulates human research. Uh, also have the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee for animal research, and

0:35:32 Thomas: But it's actually just different barnyard animals that like sit in a, it's like a pig, a chicken or whatever. They're like, we can't, come on, you got to give us some decisions. I don't know.

0:35:41 Jenessa: Honestly, it might go better that way, um, you That's federal law, you have to have one, um, you can have that be farm it out, too. Well, you can get an external company to do this for you, or you can do do it internally. A lot of universities will do it internally. But normally what that means is that, I'm doing this research in the bio department or the psych department, let's get an English professor and a dean and a community member. And they're in the university, but it's like, an independent board. Neuralink, 19 out of 22 people on their Institutional Animal Care board work for Neuralink and reportedly have financial interest in the company.

0:35:44 Thomas: Yeah, that doesn't seem like it should be allowed. That seems like not a good way to do it.

0:36:32 Jenessa: It's many concerns that, again, this is all anonymous sources in the company raising Alarms, coming to reporters saying that they're upset, they're leaving the company, research is being rushed, that this is direct from Elon Musk attempting to control the research, calling them, emailing them, saying speed up, speed up, speed up, and mistakes are being made because people are rushing. Doing experiment one, checking for what can we do better, and then doing experiment two, before they've even finished analyzing the data in experiment one, they're already on experiment two, and so they might be in the middle of that second experiment finding out that that entire second experiment is a waste because something going on in experiment one had to get fixed. And if they were wasting was Elon Musk's money, like, I don't know that any of us are caring.

0:36:37 Thomas: Hmm.

0:37:25 Thomas: Then we're all for it, yeah, yeah.

0:37:27 Jenessa: Yeah, but that waste of resource, those resources were animals' lives. It's really upsetting for the people who work there are Not loving that. And the animals are obviously probably not too happy about it. Um, you know, the FDA did an investigation and said, among the things they found, like, there was a vital signs monitor that had never been calibrated in the surgery suite, um, there were people using, uh, glue to glue things to the skull, um, was, uh, that they said, oh, we only we, the exploration elsewhere in the lab, and then, like, we only go to the animals to confirm stuff, and so retroactively a bunch of papers had the word exploratory scrubbed out of it, um, it's bad, man, there's really

0:37:30 Thomas: Mm -hmm, yeah. For sure, yeah.

0:38:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:16 Jenessa: Rough stuff that was very uncomfortable to read, I'm gonna skip the gorier details that people probably don't want to hear

0:38:21 Thomas: Yeah. That That's awful. I could not deal with that. And is this taking place in America, and I assume? There's, you know, there's rules about this shit, right?

0:38:23 Jenessa: Yeah. Yes. This is in neural links labs in America, um, FDA said they did their investigation and they didn't find anything, and a lot of people are not happy about that, um, FDA claims that all fine. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, um, they are opposed to, as far as I can tell, all animal research, I think, um, they take a pretty strong stance on this, but they are suing the University of California, uh this, this is all affiliated with the University of California.

0:39:07 Thomas: Well, yeah.

0:39:08 Jenessa: Are suing to try to get more information that they claim is being covered up about this. The lawsuit has been appropriately filed in Yolo County, California. It's in the discovery I don't know. Oh, the suit's always against like the regents of California. It doesn't specify a university because a lot of the a who work there also work at different in the California university system, Which will kind of come back to some of that. Yeah, I think obviously, like, I hope we all care about animals being treated ethically, um, also just the person who says, like, well, you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet, like, I

0:39:19 Thomas: That's near me, so Is it UC Davis? Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

0:39:38 Thomas: Mm. -hm

0:39:54 Jenessa: Don't want that guy doing my brain surgery, so Um, is concerning, um, I think the transparency is a huge part of it, um, researchers there anonymously speaking to reporters instead of being able to feel like they can go to their own institutional review board to report things and have something done about it. That's not normal. And it's part of that idea of like, it appears that is coming from Elon Musk directly intervening in this research and telling them to move faster, faster, faster. There's a lot of quotes of

0:39:54 Thomas: Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, because he's a genius, you see. So no one ever thought of just being like, do everything faster all the time. No one ever though of that. So that's why he's genius.

0:40:31 Jenessa: Like... Yes, yes, of course. This Right. Is what's so frustrating. That this man who knows nothing about neuroscience, all we really needed was not his money, but for him to just start telling people what to do in their research, that'll fix it. So, where we're at at this point, because we don't have published research, really, not much, and we don'T have the FDA trial data because he has that early feasibility designation, we've got two things. We've got some patents, which I'll get into, and we've got science by press release. We've got lots of claims and videos on YouTube of an example demonstration. I thought what might be interesting is to just go through a list of the claims that are made.

0:41:26 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:41:27 Jenessa: The first thing we got, one of the earliest things was a monkey with an implant, using that implant to move a cursor around a screen. Um, the first time that was ever done was in 2002, um, with an implant in motor cortex

0:41:40 Thomas: Wow. I didn't even know they had monkeys back then. Wow. I'm just kidding.

0:41:43 Jenessa: Yeah. Right, it feels like that's so early it feels I mean, I was 12, so that, that feels so early for that research to be done. Um, will be part of a, a theme of, like, what we have done here at Neuralink that was done, uh, decades ago. Um, the first, uh, to control a cursor was in 2002, um, we're talking about, and Musk has been talking about for a long time, oh, we're gonna get a human to control, uh, computer, and that's this latest development where Neuralink got someone in 2024, the first human to do it was was in 2004, uh, was Matthew Nagle, um, became quadriplegic, um, he got an implant from the company BrainGate, who I believe are still operating, um, they, uh, this, and he was able to control a cursor, move around screen, click on things, um, with

0:41:47 Thomas: That's a really, really dumb joke. Yeah.

0:42:39 Thomas: Log

0:42:39 Jenessa: His mind

0:42:40 Thomas: Into his AIM account. Yeah, I get it. Change the song on his MySpace profile, all this, all this 2004 stuff, you know? Yeah.

0:42:40 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, horrible dial-up noises, honestly, that chip was probably moving faster than the computer in 2004, um, did have it removed a year later, um, part of just the plan and the study, um, he switched back to what he had been doing, which is voice control of his computer. But he really positively about this experience, you know, being part of moving that science forward. One of the claims that is, hey, why is Neuralink doing so great here? Oh, it's wireless now. The first wireless use of an implant was in 2021. This was also BrainGate, they had two people in,

0:42:54 Thomas: It's Not a big controversy

0:43:29 Jenessa: Oh

0:43:30 Thomas: Involving brains, that's it, that's a company. Okay, yeah.

0:43:33 Jenessa: No, oh, that's a terrible name for a company. I didn't even think of that.

0:43:36 Thomas: Don't put gate on it the end of anything now. Yeah.

0:43:39 Jenessa: That is a big mistake, isn't it? I wonder why they did, someone had to have told them. Maybe. So there were two people in that trial. I did not come across their names, but there were were two people who were able to, in their home, not in the lab, use this wirelessly to be able to again, navigate a computer with the implant in motor cortex, which is super cool. There were those claims about controlling a computer. There were also claims about, hey, we're going to use this to move limbs around, um, first person to do that, uh, in 2013, they did this with, uh, and this was actually the company that he bought the Neuralink trademark from, um, was, uh, a number of authors, uh, Messini and Nudo, uh, the two of them had this company, they had trademarked the name Neuralink for their system that was for after TBI, restoring control of a limb. And they were doing it in rats and once again, the tragedy of animal research, when we want to study TBI and concussions, we don't wait for a car accident.

0:44:47 Thomas: Played in the rat NFL. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, oh,

0:44:57 Jenessa: Yeah, it's rough, um, uh, the two of them were developing this and it was working in rats, they were running out of money and a mysterious person wanted the name Neuralink and they sold it, and then they found out it was Elon Musk, um, in addition to all these other things he hasn't come up with, he also didn't come up with the name Neuralink, um, uh, when, when did a human get to do this? The first human to control a prosthetic limb was Eric Sordo in 2015.

0:44:57 Thomas: Man, yeah, Sure. I Hope it was his, his own, be weird if they're like, hey, you guys, you can now control that guy's prosthetic limb just for fun. Yeah.

0:45:35 Jenessa: Oh, geez. Oh, I don't want to think about what happens when this goes wireless.

0:45:39 Thomas: I was already thinking, like, if I have to fucking reconnect the Bluetooth of my brain, I swear to God, I'm gonna be so mad, I'm going to be so bad, it already doesn't, it doesn't work ever for anything, I don't know why, it just doesn't work.

0:45:44 Jenessa: Oh, God. And there's nothing you can do. There's nothing. There's just nothing you can do because at least a wire, you can be like, like, well, the wire broke and I will put a new wire, plug it in, unplug it. When the Bluetooth thing won't connect, it's just garbage.

0:45:52 Thomas: Nope. Yeah. Yeah. Huh.

0:46:06 Jenessa: Yeah, they're like, look, it is wireless now, I'm like, is that better? So Eric Sordo, this was wired, controlled a robotic arm. He was quadriplegic and they just were like, well, your two arms aren't doing much, but we will give you a third one, here's a robot arm, um, he was able to control it, um, uh, there are other individuals who've received these since then, um, he had his implant removed after six years, there was corrosion around the implant, um, talk more about, like, what's going on with that later, um, thing Musk has proposed is, well, we could get people to walk again with their own limbs, um, first time that was done was in 2018, was a trial with three people with a spinal implant for people who are paraplegic.

0:46:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:49 Thomas: Um, can be paralyzed, that would make that possible? I imagine because there's got to be different ways that happens, right?

0:46:56 Jenessa: Yeah. The central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system is neurons anywhere else in your body.

0:47:07 Thomas: Do you have neurons elsewhere in your body, like beside your brain? Oh, nerves are technically neurons? Oh, wow.

0:47:09 Jenessa: Yeah, like nerves. Nerves. Yeah yeah exactly. So it

0:47:15 Thomas: I had never heard that before.

0:47:16 Jenessa: Is physiologically pretty much the same tissue. But key difference, and the reason this is important to distinguish, they're protected by these cells called glial cells. So you have like the neurons are the ones that transmit signals. It's what you think of when you think of brains. Glial cells are like support cells. They form the immune system of the brain. Formthe blood brain barrier. And there are also these ones that form the myelin sheath. Thinkof the axon of a neuron as an electrical wire, these are like electrical tape insulator. They wrap around it and make the signal work better. The central nervous system versus the peripheral nervous system, insulation, that that glial cell, it's a different type. And we think this is why damaged neurons in the peripheral nerves system heal and damaged neurons in the central nerves system don't.

0:47:36 Thomas: Oh, Wow.

0:48:19 Jenessa: You got a deep cut on your arm, you could get some numbness around that area for a while, but it tends to come back because the nerve will grow back. Your spine or your brain is damaged, it's just damaged. It's just done. That's it. It

0:48:35 Thomas: With the plasticity kind of thing? Oh,

0:48:37 Jenessa: So the plasticity is what allows living neurons to change and adapt, yeah.

0:48:45 Thomas: But I see. So neurons don't like heal in your brain.

0:48:48 Jenessa: You're And done. You are born with the neurons you're getting, that with you your whole life. Your skin is just coming and going all day, your neurons, they're pretty much there, yeah.

0:48:48 Thomas: Wow, okay. Really? Really? Wow. So when you're tiny, they're just smashed together a lot? Uh

0:49:04 Jenessa: Yeah, basically they're just, uh, they're kind, you know, the fetal development, they're going to be, it's actually really cool, so the structure, the like bare bones structure of the brain is going to form and then the neurons in their little baby form are going to crawl up this structure into the correct placement, it's this is kind of at that point when you're like a little weird tube and you don't look like a human yet, but they're kind of like, this, this skeleton of a brain is going to start forming, and then, like, from beneath, these little proto-neuron goop is like crawling its little limbs up the structure.

0:49:15 Thomas: -huh. Whoa. From where? Yeah.

0:49:42 Thomas: That's crazy.

0:49:42 Jenessa: It's so wild, um, basically, once, once you're out and about and you're starting to learn stuff, stuff, what is changing is which neurons are connected and which ones are disconnecting, um, yeah, you're gonna be born and die with pretty much all the same ones, you'll, you'll, you'll birth some new ones in the hippocampus, um, was a relatively recent discovery that in adult humans you'll get new neurons in the epicampus, but otherwise, other parts of the brain, I mean, yeah, it, they're dead, they're dead. That's why a stroke, a TBI, sort of head wound, extremely dangerous a spinal injury as well.

0:50:11 Thomas: Weird.

0:50:20 Thomas: Okay. Then how we giving people who are paralyzed the ability to move again? What's happening there?

0:50:28 Jenessa: Yeah. So what they did here is a spinal implant. What they did is, OK, in these individuals, um, they were paraplegic, meaning like, um, the arms were working, um, but like the legs weren't, so somewhere between, somewhere in the torso is where the spinal injury occurred. The signal, the motor signal in the brain is fine, and it goes, it starts going down the spinal cord, and then it hits the injury and it cannot go further, it cannot make it down to the the legs.

0:50:42 Thomas: Hmm.

0:50:58 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:50:58 Jenessa: And that's why the signal gets sent and it doesn't get received. What they did is just bypass the injury. Had a connection from the motor cortex down to the spine that wasn't injured and just send the signal out. And it worked. Guy, okay, this is a Swedish name. I am going to try my best. Per-Jan Oxum. He had been paralyzed for 12 years and he got a spinal implant. First three people in this trial was in 2018. He got his implant in 2022. And there's videos of him on YouTube walking after 12 years.

0:51:18 Thomas: Really?

0:51:41 Thomas: That's crazy.

0:51:42 Jenessa: It's incredible, incredible technology, um, mean, I, yeah, I don't even know what to say, it's it's unbelievable, uh, what we're capable

0:51:49 Thomas: But there's a reason this isn't, like, widely available, I assume. That's where we're going to pause it for now, but be sure to catch part two next episode where Jenessa is going to take us through even more about this technology and companies not named Neuralink and what they're doing. And also, also, certain instances in which things have gone wrong, because essentially capitalism. So, lots more to come. So fascinating. Thanks again to Dr. Jenessa Seymour. And I'll see you all next episode, part two. See you then.

0:51:49 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna get there, um,