Elon Musk and The Neuralink Hype
by
Santosh Helekar
There has been a spate of news stories and articles about a surgical procedure conducted at the behest of a company called Neuralink, founded by the maverick billionaire Elon Musk. The procedure appears to have involved implanting a microchip containing tiny electrodes in the surface of the brain of a disabled human volunteer by opening a small window in the overlying skull and closing it with a flap of skull bone. The hope is that the chip will record electrical activity in the superficial layers of the part of the brain that normally controls movements of a limb.
This activity could then wirelessly trigger a prosthetic (artificial) limb to move in the right way based on the intent of the person, assuming that the pattern of activity faithfully reflects this intent. Such wireless transmissions could allow direct interaction with a computer or any other electronic machine – an arrangement that has been dubbed a brain-computer interface (BCI). All one needs is the right artificial intelligence (AI)-based software recognizing the specific meaning of the electrical activity pattern and translating it into a command for a software program installed on the computer.
The broader implications from this that Musk and his publicists in the media, as well as a few well-meaning science enthusiasts, have been eager to spread are that, besides intents transmitted to all kinds of machines, thoughts could be communicated from person to person, as if by telepathy. In fact, Musk says he will call the new microchip device Telepathy. This of course implies that even normal non disabled individuals will want, and be allowed, to undergo risky brain surgery to have a microchip implanted in their brain. It also implies that brain science has already established that conscious intent and thought patterns can be deciphered from the electrical activity of nerve cells of the outer layers of the brain. Some have also gone further and claimed that this technology could cure neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and enhance memory, intelligence, and cognition, in general.
The assumption here is even more foolhardy – that we already know exactly what goes wrong in these disorders and how specific memories and cognitive skills are encoded in the brain, and that all this entirely depends on specific patterns of neural electrical activity, which can be easily deciphered by AI.
The reality though is that none of the above implied assumptions has been established as true by mainstream brain research over the last 100 years. There are essentially two problems with the breathless claims about Neuralink’s promise. The biggest problem and one that, in my opinion, is troublesome even for the viability and profitability of Neuralink as a company, is the following.
My informed opinion as a brain scientist, deeply involved in the weeds of the question at the scientific foundations of the Neuralink enterprise, is that this emperor has no clothes. The whole enterprise rests on the belief that the phenomenon of consciousness has a sound scientific explanation with neural electrical activity playing an exclusive causal role in generating its contents, such as intents, feelings, beliefs, thoughts, etc., in discrete patterns that can be mined by an AI-based software program. The truth, on the other hand, is that nobody knows what makes us conscious, despite more than two thousand years of philosophizing.
The last 50 years have been spent by the world’s best brain scientists in recording electrical activity of the brain using a variety of techniques, including the implantation of microchips in the brains of mice, monkeys, and men. These efforts have made great strides in understanding some aspects of how the brain processes information. But nary a thing has been learned about how it produces consciousness.
Indeed, there is now a good case to be made that while electrical activity of the brain is instrumental in unconscious information processing and signaling within the brain and to peripheral bodily tissues, such as the muscles, it may have little or no direct role to play in generating conscious experiences, especially their qualitative content. This has led many well recognized scientists such as the Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose to dig deeper into the nature of physical matter itself and situate the origin of consciousness at the level of fundamental quantum physics.
While almost all this deep digging is theoretical at present, I for one in my small way have recently embarked on an improbable quest to experimentally test the quantum biological underpinnings of consciousness and have achieved a modicum of serendipitous success. The work done in my laboratory over the last 2 years has revealed that a previously unrecognized form of non-electrical activity, possibly quantum in origin, which can be recorded without implanting a microchip in the brain, might be responsible for all our conscious percepts, intents, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings (my recent talks on this work at Oxford University and California Institute for Human Science can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdDNMFyzZ8E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDP90m83Etk ). In other words, chances are Elon Musk is digging for gold in the wrong place.
This brings me to the second problem with claims that rely on implanting a microchip in the brain. While people with severe deficits might consent to brain surgeons cracking their skulls open to insert microelectronic foreign objects into their brains, and governmental regulatory agencies might allow such interventions, normal people are unlikely to subject themselves to such invasive procedures, no matter how much they like the idea of instant “telepathic” communication.
No healthy individual would want to expose herself/himself to the risks, however small, associated with a brain operation, of bleeding, infection, brain damage, some unknown neuropsychiatric dysfunction and death, and the regulatory bodies would be loathe to allow it. Of course, one could imagine Neuralink serving a narrow niche market consisting of a small segment of disabled people as customers. But even this prospect would be fleeting because a completely noninvasive, truly disruptive, technology born out of our efforts would be nipping at its heels and soon render it obsolete.
There are ethical hurdles for this type of technology as well, but at least our skulls would remain intact and brains unviolated. As for curing degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, it is entirely a different kettle of fish, impenetrable to any technology involving BCI, invasive or noninvasive. Some impairments of movement resulting from such conditions could be addressed by it but nothing that could get to the heart of the problem.
For the sake of completeness, I would like to end by providing a gratuitous piece of advice. It is not a good idea to trust claims about scientific breakthroughs reported in the popular press and social media by commercial entities or their CEOs with itchy trigger fingers, without being backed by a peer-reviewed publication in a reputed scientific journal. This applies to our own work alluded to above, even though it has been presented at recognized international scientific conferences and I do not own a company selling wares that might result from it. But it applies even more to the Neuralink announcement, which has not been vetted by subject-specific scientific experts, and which touts very premature findings. Besides, in both cases the hackneyed Konknni saying, the priest has just gone to take a bath, applies.
Santosh A. Helekar is a brain scientist based in the United States. He was born and raised in Goa, and he graduated from Goa Medical College. He is presently the Scientific Director of Translational Biomagnetics and Neurometry Program of the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Houston, Texas, and Associate Professor of Research in Neuroscience at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City.
