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Elon Musk: Understanding the Human Brain at Neuralink


Transcript

We currently understand very little about the human brain. Do you also hope that the work at Neuralink will help us understand more about the human mind, about the brain? Yeah, I think the work at Neuralink will definitely shed a lot of insight into how the brain and the mind works.

Right now, just the data we have regarding how the brain works is very limited. We've got fMRI, which is kind of like putting a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall, and then putting it all over the factory wall, and you can sort of hear the sounds, but you don't know what the machines are doing, really.

You can infer a few things, but it's a very broad brushstroke. In order to really know what's going on in the brain, you have to have high-precision sensors, and then you want to have stimulus and response, like if you trigger a neuron, how do you feel, what do you see, how does it change your perception of the world?

You're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain, being able to measure signals from the brain, will give us sort of open the door inside the factory. Yes, exactly. Being able to have high-precision sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing, and then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the response is in the brain, so you can see the consequences of if you fire this neuron, what happens, how do you feel, what does it change?

It'll be really profound to have this in people, because people can articulate their change, like if there's a change in mood, or if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better, or be able to form sentences better or worse, or their memories are jogged, or that kind of thing.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.