Brain Implants Have Begun to Restore Functions, but Advances Are Slow

The scientists at the Neuralink event on Nov. 30 and those watching online agreed that the engineering that Mr. Musk showed off was an elegant mash-up of some of the best ideas in the decades-old field. Replacing the soda-can-like protrusion from the head would indeed be a significant advance, they acknowledged.

Neuralink’s device prototype would eliminate that problem, but only after patients undergo robotic surgery to cut a hole in the head slightly larger than a quarter. Then the robot knits 1,024 cobweb-thin electrode tendrils into the gray matter of the brain and rests the puck-like device in the hole.

With work so delicate, some researchers in the field worry that one high-profile misstep could erase years of progress.

“The communications coming out of Neuralink too often sounds like cowboy activity, right?” said Marcus Gerhardt, chief executive of Blackrock Microsystems, a brain-computer interface company that could be a Musk rival.

Mr. Gerhardt said the neurosurgeons affiliated with his company “are petrified every day that something terrible could happen there and affect the rest of the space.”

Mr. Beggin is one of about three dozen people who have a device called a “Utah array” implanted in the brain for research purposes. The device includes a small grid of electrodes that are dipped barely two millimeters into his brain. That is linked to a portal mounted on his head and, via cables, to another computer.

Most of the days Mr. Beggin spends working with the Cleveland research team involve looking at a moving arm or hand on a computer screen and envisioning himself making the same motion. That allows researchers to detect the neuron-firing patterns in his brain that give rise to each movement. Those signals are communicated to a system that manipulates eight nerves in his arm to make it move, said A. Bolu Ajiboye, a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University whose team has been working with patients like Mr. Beggin.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/health/elon-musk-brain-implants-paralysis.html