Neuralink is big news, but what is it?

If we just read about Neuralink in a blog, minus the news bits, facts and quotes, it sounds like a science fiction horror movie story. Given that it’s the product of Elon Musk, owner of Tesla company, among other things, it just might have passed off as fiction. But Neuralink is very real. We keep hearing about it, and it wants to become a sixth sense for humanity.    

What is Neuralink? 
Scientists (and none of them are mad) have been hard on work with developing Neuralink. Even then, when the company unveiled a live stream video on YouTube on July 17, 2019, people were shocked. Neuralink is a brain chip interface. That’s right, a chip that reads signals from your brain, passes it on to a computer, and does your bidding. On a more serious note, Neuralink is a device that will first be used to help paraplegics with simple tasks such as using a mobile or clicking a mouse without any physical contact or movement involved. Human trials have not started yet, but we may hear of it any day. It has been tested on mice, pig and monkeys though. 

How will Neuralink work?  
To begin with, a robotic hand will perform a surgery to place a chip with electrodes under the skull. It’s a micro surgery and very precision oriented. The chip with casing comes to 8 mm by 4 mm. Coming out of the casing will be 1,024 electrodes, 6 nanometers in diameter. No wonder a robotic surgeon is needed, because a human surgeon can’t even see these electrodes. The rest of Neuralink is outside, it’s a wearable behind the ear, a bit like a hearing aid. This is called the Link, it has the batteries and the software. It is, in short, a computer with internet connectivity planted inside our brain.  

What is the future vision of Neuralink?  
Elon Musk is an ace businessman, so he won’t be stopping at just building a medical aid. So far, he has not pushed for Neuralink to be covered by medical insurance either. This means anyone can get it. Does this mean our brain will be working even faster? Will we be controlling devices without touching them? We don’t know yet, but that’s the vision we have got so far.