It was the stuff of science fiction even until five years ago, and yet it has been coming.

The first month of 2024 ended with tech billionaire Elon Musk announcing that his company Neuralink had successfully implanted what Musk calls in a paper (not peer-reviewed) Neuralink’s first steps towards a scalable high-bandwidth “BMI” system.

BMI is short for brain-machine interface.

This development has implications beyond just the healthcare industry if pursued in all its possible dimensions.

Musk claims that the BMI Neuralink is developing “has unprecedented packaging density and scalability in a clinically relevant package.” It presently consists of arrays of small and flexible electrode ‘threads’, which number 3,072 electrodes per array. These are distributed across 96 threads.

A nano-surgical robot has been developed to insert six such threads per minute into the brain or 192 electrodes per minute. The insertion will occur with ‘micron precision’ and into specific brain regions.

After the insertion process is complete, an array would have produced 3,072 data channels within a small volume of a few cubic metres. From it, using a USB-C cable, data streaming would be done.

According to Musk, “this system has achieved a spiking yield of up to 70% in chronically implanted electrodes.”

Brain Implants

There is already a long history to brain implants.

The term ‘cyborg’ was coined by physiologist Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline in 1960. It came about in the context of exploring extraterrestrial space with organisms modified to meet the tough conditions of space.

Clynes and Kline defined a cyborg as an organism-machine system which “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.”

One of the first cyborgs was a rat weighing 220 grams. It had an osmotic pump under its skin that was designed to slowly, continuous inject chemicals at a controlled rate into an organism without any attention on the part of the organism.

In their paper, they went beyond the rat and explored the idea of integration of machines in humans. Such humans, they argued, with the “incorporation of integral exogenous devices to bring about the biological changes… live in space qua natura.”

Soon, it was clear that, more than in space, such ‘integral exogenous devices’ would have tremendous impact in medical sciences right here on Earth.

In the 1960s, physiologist José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado used brain implants to elicit a wide range of emotions in animals.

In an iconic photo, the physiologist stood before a charging bull and controlled it to submission with a radio transmitter device. The bull carried a brain implant.

In 1970, the book Future Shock by techno-sociologist Alvin Toffler carried a subsection titled ‘The Cyborgs among us’!

Toffler pointed out the ever-increasing numbers of people among us who have devices like pacemakers and artificial heart valves.

Like all great innovations in science, creative writers latched on to the idea with both fascination and Frankenstein complex.

Michael Crichton wrote his popular novel Terminal Man (1972) about a patient who, after receiving a brain implant as a novel means of treating his seizures which were accompanied by blackouts and violence, becomes even more violent and somehow pleasures himself through activating the electrodes planted in him.

Towards the end of the novel, a woman escapes the rage-induced patient by activating a microwave oven which interferes with his transmission mechanism.

Amazingly, Crichton anticipated almost all of the Neuralink features. For example, the brain implant was connected with a computer through microwave transmission (instead of broadband and satellite networks).

Neuralink Trials

In 2021, Musk’s company released a video of a nine-year-old macaque monkey playing ping pong with his mind.

A BMI was placed inside the motor cortex region of the monkey’s brain that is related to the movement of the hand.

Then, the monkey was made to learn the use of a joystick to play ping pong using the typical reward system of learning.

Even as the monkey learned to play ping pong, the BMI learned the brain patterns of the monkey in relation to the joystick movement.

Then, the joystick was removed.

As the monkey looked at the screen and thought about the movement, the brain patterns that the BMI already knew to be correlates of the movement were transmitted to effect gameplay on the screen.

Interesting Future

In his paper, Musk had revealed yet another ambitious future: humans with multiple brain implants in various regions of the brain.

It has already been demonstrated that beyond the motor organ prosthetics, a person can be hooked to a ‘facial avatar animation’ which can be made to speak with the thoughts of patients at the rate of 72 words per minute.

Will all these advances be only for medical purposes? The following words of Toffler, written half a century ago, makes relevant reading here:

(Read the Musk pre-print paper here.)