Neuralink & the Safety of Brain Implants | Dr. Matt MacDougall & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | There's a long history, dating back really prior to the 1950s, of scientists doing experiments

00:00:09.560 | on themselves.

00:00:12.440 | Not because they are reckless, but because they want the exact sorts of information that

00:00:16.880 | you're talking about.

00:00:17.880 | The ability to really understand how intention and awareness of goals can shape outcomes

00:00:25.380 | in biology.

00:00:26.380 | And if that is vague to people listening, what I mean here is that for many, probably

00:00:31.360 | hundreds of years, if not longer, scientists have taken the drugs they've studied, or stimulated

00:00:37.280 | their own brain, or done things to really try and get a sense of what the animals they

00:00:41.640 | work on or the patients they work on might be experiencing.

00:00:44.440 | Psychiatrists are sort of famous for this, by the way.

00:00:46.120 | I'm not pointing fingers at anybody, but psychiatrists are known to try the drugs that they administer.

00:00:50.880 | And some people would probably imagine that's a good thing, just so that the clinicians

00:00:56.440 | could have empathy for the sorts of side effects and not-so-great effects of some of these

00:01:00.860 | drugs that they administer to patients.

00:01:03.380 | But the confidence test I present you is, would you be willing, or are you willing,

00:01:12.680 | if allowed, to have these electrodes implanted into your motor cortex?

00:01:18.760 | You're not a quadriplegic.

00:01:20.260 | You can move your limbs.

00:01:21.980 | But given the state of the technology at Neuralink now, would you do that?

00:01:28.060 | Or maybe in the next couple of years, if you were allowed, would you be willing to do that

00:01:32.580 | and be the person to say, hey, turn up the stimulation over there?

00:01:36.500 | I feel like I want to reach for the cup with that robotic arm, but I'm feeling some resistance.

00:01:42.180 | Because it's exactly that kind of experiment done on a person who can move their limbs

00:01:48.420 | and who deeply understands the technology and the goals of the experiment that I would

00:01:52.660 | argue actually stands to advance the technology fastest, as opposed to putting the electrodes

00:01:58.060 | first into somebody who is impaired at a number of levels and then trying to think about why

00:02:04.020 | things aren't working.

00:02:06.060 | And again, this is all with the goal of reversing paralysis in mind.

00:02:13.000 | But would you implant yourself with these microelectrodes?

00:02:15.100 | Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:16.380 | I would be excited to do that.

00:02:18.580 | I think for the first iteration of the device, it probably wouldn't be very meaningful.

00:02:23.580 | It wouldn't be very useful, because I can still move my limbs.

00:02:26.620 | And our first outputs from this are things that I can do just as easily with my hands,

00:02:31.540 | right?

00:02:32.540 | Moving a mouse, typing on a keyboard.

00:02:35.680 | We are necessarily making this device as a medical device, for starters, for people with

00:02:41.780 | bad medical problems and no good options.

00:02:46.020 | It wouldn't really make sense for an able-bodied person to get one in the near term.

00:02:52.640 | As the technology develops and we make devices specifically designed to perform functions

00:02:59.020 | that can't be done even by an able-bodied person, say, eventually refine the technique

00:03:04.860 | to get to the point where you can type faster with your mind and one of these devices than

00:03:11.300 | you can with text-to-speech or speech-to-text and your fingers, that's a use case that makes

00:03:18.580 | sense for someone like me to get it.

00:03:20.640 | It doesn't really make sense for me to get one when it allows me to use a mouse slightly

00:03:26.100 | worse than I can with my hand currently.

00:03:29.140 | That said, the safety of the device, I would absolutely vouch for.

00:03:33.220 | From the hundreds of surgeries that I've personally done with this, I think it's much safer than

00:03:40.280 | many of the industry-standard FDA-approved surgeries that I routinely do on patients

00:03:47.900 | that no one even thinks twice about their standard of care.

00:03:54.060 | Neuralink has already reached, in my mind, a safety threshold that is far beyond a commonly

00:04:00.820 | accepted safety threshold.

00:04:04.100 | Along the lines of augmenting one's biological function or functions in the world, I think

00:04:08.300 | now's the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand.

00:04:15.260 | For those listening, not watching, it looks like a small lump between Dr. McDougal's forefinger

00:04:23.260 | and thumb or index finger and thumb placed on skin on the top of his hand.

00:04:31.660 | You've had this for some years now because we've known each other for, gosh, probably

00:04:35.020 | seven years now or so, and you've always had it in the time that I've known you.

00:04:39.020 | What is that lump and why did you put it in there?

00:04:43.580 | Yeah.

00:04:44.580 | It's a small writable RFID tag.

00:04:47.620 | What's an RFID?

00:04:48.620 | What does RFID stand for?

00:04:50.100 | Yeah, radio frequency identification.

00:04:53.100 | It's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can temporarily power.

00:05:01.180 | If you approach an antenna, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth.

00:05:07.700 | Most phones have the capability of reading and writing to this chip.

00:05:12.540 | For years, it let me into my house.

00:05:16.340 | It unlocked a deadbolt on my front door.

00:05:19.660 | For some years, it unlocked the doors at Neuralink and let me through the various locked doors

00:05:26.700 | inside the building.

00:05:30.020 | It is writable.

00:05:31.020 | I can write a small amount of data to it.

00:05:33.380 | For some years in the early days of crypto, I had a crypto private key written on it to

00:05:42.060 | store a cryptocurrency that I thought was a dead offshoot of one of the main cryptocurrencies

00:05:48.700 | after it had forked.

00:05:50.820 | I put the private wallet key on there and forgot about it and remembered a few years

00:05:55.940 | later that it was there and went and checked and it was worth a few thousand dollars more

00:05:59.980 | than when I had left it on there.

00:06:02.460 | That was a nice finding change in the sofa in the 21st century.

00:06:06.500 | When you say you read it, you're essentially taking a phone or other device and scanning

00:06:10.100 | it over the lump in your hand, so to speak, and then it can read the data from there essentially.

00:06:18.400 | What other sorts of things could one put into these RFIDs in theory?

00:06:23.220 | How long can they stay in there before you need to take them out and recharge them or

00:06:27.820 | replace them?

00:06:29.180 | These are passive.

00:06:30.180 | They're coated in biocompatible glass and as an extra, I'm a rock climber and so I was

00:06:36.180 | worried about that glass shattering during rock climbing.

00:06:40.820 | I additionally coated them in another ring of silicone before implanting that.

00:06:46.020 | It's pretty safe.

00:06:47.180 | They're passive.

00:06:48.180 | There's no battery.

00:06:49.180 | There's no active electronics in them.

00:06:52.180 | They could last the rest of my life.

00:06:53.500 | I don't think I'd ever have to remove it for any reason.

00:06:56.020 | At some point, the technology is always improving, so I might remove it and upgrade it.

00:07:02.540 | That's not inconceivable.

00:07:03.540 | Already, there's 10X more storage versions available.

00:07:08.040 | That could be a drop-in replacement for this if I ever remove it, but it has a small niche

00:07:16.280 | use case and it's an interesting proof of concept tiptoeing towards the concept that

00:07:22.020 | you mentioned of you have to be willing to go through the things that you're suggesting

00:07:27.000 | to your patients in order to say with a straight face that you think this is a reasonable thing

00:07:32.920 | to do.

00:07:35.800 | A small subcutaneous implant in the hand is a little different than a brain implant.

00:07:40.120 | What's involved in getting that RFID chip into the hand?

00:07:43.640 | I'm assuming it's an outpatient procedure.

00:07:46.120 | Presumably, you did it on yourself.

00:07:47.640 | Yeah, yeah.

00:07:48.640 | This was a kitchen table kind of procedure.

00:07:51.600 | Any anesthetic or no?

00:07:55.560 | I've seen people do this with a lidocaine injection.

00:07:59.000 | For my money, I think a lidocaine injection is probably as painful as just doing the procedures.

00:08:03.440 | Just a little cut in that thin skin on the top of the hand.

00:08:06.440 | Some people are cringing right now.

00:08:07.600 | Other people are saying, "I want one," because you'll never have to worry about losing your

00:08:10.960 | keys or passwords.

00:08:12.840 | I actually would like it for passwords, because I'm dreadfully bad at remembering passwords.

00:08:18.120 | I have to put them in places all over the place.

00:08:21.440 | I'm like that kid in – remember that movie, Stand By Me, where the kid hides the pennies

00:08:25.280 | under the porch and then loses the map?

00:08:27.800 | Spends all summer trying to find them.

00:08:30.360 | I can relate.

00:08:31.360 | Yeah, so it was just a little slit and then put in there.

00:08:34.560 | No local immune response, no pus, no swelling.

00:08:38.240 | All the materials are completely biocompatible.

00:08:41.120 | They're on the surface, exposed to the body, so no bad reaction.

00:08:44.440 | It healed up in days and it was fine.

00:08:47.960 | Very cool.

00:08:48.960 | Since we're on video here, can you just maybe raise it and show us?

00:08:53.480 | Were you not to point out that little lump, I wouldn't have known to ask about it.

00:09:01.320 | Any other members of your family have these?

00:09:03.560 | A few years after having this and seeing the convenience of me being able to open the door

00:09:08.280 | without keys, my wife insisted that I put one in her as well, so she's walking around

00:09:13.000 | with one.

00:09:14.000 | Fantastic.

00:09:15.000 | We consider them our version of wedding rings.

00:09:17.760 | [music]

Neuralink & the Safety of Brain Implants | Dr. Matt MacDougall & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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