Episode #438 from 2:01:36
How Neuralink works
Well, they're mostly quiet, but when they speak, they say profound shit. That's the way I'd like to think about it. Anyway, before we zoom in even more, let's zoom out. So how does Neuralink work from the surgery to the implant, to the signal and the decoding process, and the human being able to use the implant to actually affect the world outside? And all of this, I'm asking in the context of, there's a gigantic historic milestone that Neuralink just accomplished in January of this year. Putting a Neuralink implant in the first human being, Noland. And there's been a lot to talk about there about his experience because he's able to describe all the nuance and the beauty and the fascinating complexity of that experience of everything involved. But on the technical level, how does Neuralink work? So there are three major components to the technology that we're building. One is the device, the thing that's actually recording these neural chatters. We call it N1 Implant or The Link. And we have a surgical robot that's actually doing an implantation of these tiny, tiny wires that we call threads that are smaller than human hair. And once everything is surgerized, you have these neural signals, these spiking neurons, that are coming out of the brain, and you need to have some sort of software to decode what the users intend to do with that. So there's what's called the Neuralink Application or B1 App that's doing that translation. It's running the very, very simple machine learning model that decodes these inputs that are neural signals and then convert it to a set of outputs that allows our first participant, Noland, to be able to control a cursor on the screen.
Why this moment matters
Well, they're mostly quiet, but when they speak, they say profound shit. That's the way I'd like to think about it. Anyway, before we zoom in even more, let's zoom out. So how does Neuralink work from the surgery to the implant, to the signal and the decoding process, and the human being able to use the implant to actually affect the world outside? And all of this, I'm asking in the context of, there's a gigantic historic milestone that Neuralink just accomplished in January of this year. Putting a Neuralink implant in the first human being, Noland. And there's been a lot to talk about there about his experience because he's able to describe all the nuance and the beauty and the fascinating complexity of that experience of everything involved. But on the technical level, how does Neuralink work? So there are three major components to the technology that we're building. One is the device, the thing that's actually recording these neural chatters. We call it N1 Implant or The Link. And we have a surgical robot that's actually doing an implantation of these tiny, tiny wires that we call threads that are smaller than human hair. And once everything is surgerized, you have these neural signals, these spiking neurons, that are coming out of the brain, and you need to have some sort of software to decode what the users intend to do with that. So there's what's called the Neuralink Application or B1 App that's doing that translation. It's running the very, very simple machine learning model that decodes these inputs that are neural signals and then convert it to a set of outputs that allows our first participant, Noland, to be able to control a cursor on the screen.