On Friday, Elon Musk demonstrated the tech behind his brain-computer user interface start-up, Neuralink, in a livestreamed demo that involved considerably more pigs than anybody expected.
And they didn’t seem particularly thinking about whatever the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had to reveal. When one piggy– Gertrude– was lastly confined into view after a few minutes concealing behind a drape, a cordless link from the Neuralink gadget implanted in her skull relayed her brain activity in real-time to a close-by screen as she snuffled around a pen onstage.
” It resembles a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk stated of the coin-sized gadget. Here’s how it works: A chip is embedded into a little hole drilled into the skull, and it gets signals from brain activity utilizing 1,024 thread-like electrodes, each thinner than a human hair. That chip then transfers the data through Bluetooth to outside devices within a series of about 16-32 feet (5-10 meters).
Musk’s team also displayed a piggy that had 2 Neuralink implants, as well as one that had a gadget implanted and later eliminated. All the pigs appeared to be unfazed by the process. The stitching machine-like robot responsible for implanting these ultra-thin threads, initially mentioned during a Neuralink discussion Musk made in 2019, likewise made a look during the livestream.
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