There was quite a bit of fanfare when Neuralink showed off its brain-computer interface (BCI) via the first successful transplant, even if there was a slight scare two months down the line. Since then though, it looks like the company has a second successful human transplant, though this second person was not identified, not did they get much fanfare.
Reuters reports that Elon Musk, who owns Neuralink, shared the existence of this second successful human transplant, via an eight-hour podcast. Not much else has been shared about this person, beyond the fact that they also had suffered a spinal cord injury. Musk did not share when the surgery for this second person was done either, but says that he expects the company to provide the implant to eight more patents this year as part of its clinical trials.
The report quotes Musk as saying in the podcast “I don’t want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant”. He continued with “there’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well”. Slightly conflicting with this quote is the mention of 400 of the implant’s electrodes working, despite the BCI using 1,024 electrodes.
Addressing the issue with the first transplant, Nolan Arbaugh, which saw some of the electrodes retracting from where they were implanted, the workaround at the time was to improve the electrodes’ sensitivity with algorithm tweaks. Musk says that even “with only roughly 10, 15% of the electrodes working”, Arbaugh has improved on his previous world record for the speed at which he can control a cursor with thoughts alone.
(Source: Reuters)
