Dr. Matthew MacDougall: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains

I think the energy levels involved are so tiny that, ionizing radiation aside, we're way out of the realm of ionizing radiation that people would worry about tumor-causing EMF fields. Even just the electromagnetic field itself, as is very well described in a Bluetooth frequency range, the power levels are tiny in these devices. We are awash in these signals, whether you use Bluetooth headphones or not.

There's so much atrophy that happens with an alcohol-soaked brain chronically that I would say that's, far and away, the most common source of brain damage that many of us just volunteer for.

Plasticity definitely goes down in older brains. It is harder for older people to learn new things, to make radical changes in their behavior, to kick habits that they've had for years.

We are making a neural implant. We have a robotic insertion device that helps place tiny electrodes smaller than the size of a human hair all throughout a small region of the brain ... We are hoping to implant a series of these electrodes into the brains of people that have had a bad spinal cord injury.

There's hope that eventually there's a use here that makes sense for a brain interface to bring AI as a tool embedded in the brain that a human can use to augment their capabilities. I think that's pretty far down the road for us but definitely on a desired roadmap. In the near-term, we really are focused on people with terrible medical problems that have no options right now.

The safety of the device I would absolutely vouch for from the hundreds of surgeries that I've personally done with this. I think it's much safer than many of the industry-standard FDA-approved surgeries that I routinely do on patients ... Neuralink has already reached, in my mind, a safety threshold that is far beyond a commonly accepted safety threshold.

Undoubtedly, the human that has a Neuralink device will get better at using it over time. Undoubtedly, the software that the Neuralink engineers have written will adapt to the firing patterns that that device is able to record, and overtime, focus in on meaningful signals toward movement.