Elon Musk’s Neuralink has successfully implanted a second patient

Elon Musk’s Neuralink has successfully implanted its device into the brain of a second human patient, he said in a recent interview.

“I don’t want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant. There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well,” said Musk on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Friday (2 August), the episode of which ran for over eight hours.

“Progress is good and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. The patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking,” he said.

The Neuralink device is a brain-computer interface designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices through their thoughts. The chips work by inserting 64 tiny threads into the brain, each of which includes several electrodes acting as the link between the brain and the chip. The chip then connects with an app so patients can control devices using their thoughts.

The first Neuralink implant was not without problems

The first human to be implanted with the device, Noland Arbaugh, has seen great success with it, even comparing it to “having an aimbot in [my] head.” He also said, “It has given me the ability to do things on my own again without needing my family at all hours of the day and night.”

This is although some days after the implant, many of the 64 threads retracted leaving only around 15% of the chip’s electrodes in use. Musk and other Neuralink executives explained on a live stream how they had worked to resolve the issue and mitigate risks for future implants.

“In upcoming implants, we plan to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant … that will put it closer to the brain and eliminate some of the tension on the threads,” said Neuralink’s head of neurosurgery, Matthew MacDougall.

They were also able to adapt and update the software side of things to respond more effectively to the reduced capacity of electrodes.

Featured image credit: Midjourney

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