welcome to the huberman Lab podcast
where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life
I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at
Stanford school of medicine today my
guest is Dr Matthew McDougall Dr Matthew
McDougall is the head neurosurgeon at
neurolink neurolink is a company whose
goal is to develop Technologies to
overcome specific clinical challenges of
the brain and nervous system as well as
to improve upon brain design that is to
improve the way that brains currently
function by augmenting memory by
augmenting cognition and by improving
communication between humans and between
machines and humans these are all of
course tremendous goals and neurolink is
uniquely poised to accomplish these
goals because they are approaching these
challenges by combining both existing
knowledge of brain function from the
fields of Neuroscience and neurosurgery
with robotics machine learning computer
science and the development of Novel
devices in order to change the ways that
human brains work for the better today's
conversation with Dr Matthew McDougall
is a truly special one because I and
many others in science and medicine
consider neurosurgeons the astronauts of
Neuroscience in the brain that is they
go where others have simply not gone
before and are in a position to discover
incredibly novel things about how the
human brain works because they are
literally in there probing and cutting
stimulating Etc and able to monitor how
people's cognition and behavior and
speech changes as the brain itself has
changed structurally and functionally
today's discussion with Dr McDougall
will teach you how the brain works
through the lens of a neurosurgeon it
will also teach you about neuralink
specific perspective about which
challenges of brain function and disease
are immediately tractable which ones
they are working on now that is as well
as where they see the future of
augmenting brain function for sake of
treating disease and for simply making
brains work better
today's discussion also gets into the
realm of devising the peripheral nervous
system in fact one thing that you'll
learn is that Dr McDougall has a radio
receiver implanted in the periphery of
his own body he did this not to overcome
any specific clinical challenge but to
overcome a number of daily everyday life
challenges and in some ways to
demonstrate the powerful utility of
combining novel machines novel devices
with what we call our nervous system and
different objects and Technologies
within the world I know that might sound
a little bit mysterious but you'll soon
learn exactly what I'm referring to and
by the way he also implanted his family
members with similar devices so while
all of this might sound a little bit
like science fiction this is truly
science reality these experiments both
the implantation of specific devices and
the attempt to overcome specific
movement disorders such as Parkinson's
and other disorders of deep brain
function as well as to augment the human
brain and make it work far better than
it ever has in the the course of human
evolution are experiments and things
that are happening now at neuralink Dr
McDougall also generously takes us under
the hood so to speak of what's happening
at neurolink explaining exactly the
sorts of experiments that they are doing
and have planned how they are
approaching those experiments we get
into an extensive conversation about the
utility of animal versus human research
in probing brain function and in
devising and improving the human brain
and in overcoming disease in terms of
neurosurgery and neural links goals by
the end of today's episode you will have
a much clearer understanding of how
human brains work and how they can be
improved by Robotics and engineering and
you'll have a very clear picture of what
neural link is doing toward these goals
Dr McDougall did his medical training at
the University of California San Diego
and at Stanford University School of
Medicine and of course is now at
neurolink so he is in a unique stance to
teach us about human brain function and
dysfunction and to explain to us what
the past present and future of brain
augmentation is really all about before
we begin I'd like to emphasize that this
podcast is separate from my teaching and
research roles at Stanford it is however
part of my desire and effort to bring
zero cost to Consumer information about
science and science related tools to the
general public in keeping with that
theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of
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first box and now for my discussion with
Dr Matthew McDougall Dr McDougall
welcome good to be here nice to see
Andrew great to see you again uh we'll
get into our history a little bit later
but just to kick things off
as a neurosurgeon and as a
neuroscientist can you share with us
your vision of the brain as an organ as
it relates to what's possible there I
mean I think most everyone understands
that the brain is along with the body
the seat of our cognition feelings our
ability to move Etc and the Damage there
can limit our ability to feel the way we
want to feel or move the way we want to
move but
surgeons tend to view the world a little
bit differently than most because as the
not so funny joke goes you know they
like to cut and they like to fix and
they like to mend and they in your case
have the potential to add things into
the brain that don't exist there already
so how do you think about and
conceptualize the brain as an organ and
what do you think is really possible
with the brain that most of us don't
already probably think about yeah that's
a great question
thinking about the brain as this three
pound lump of meat trapped in a prison
of the skull
it seems almost magical that it could
create a you know human a human set of
behaviors and a life
merely from electrical impulses when you
start to see patients and see say a
small tumor eating away at a little part
of the brain and see a very discrete
function of that brain go down in
isolation you start to realize that the
brain really is a collection of
functional modules pinned together duct
taped together
um in this in this bone box attached to
your head
um and sometimes you see very
interesting failure modes so one of the
most
memorable patience I ever had was very
early on in my training I was down at UC
San Diego and saw a very young guy who
had just been in a car accident we had
operated on him and you know as is so
often the case in neurosurgery we had
saved his life
potentially at the cost of quality of
life
when he woke from surgery with bilateral
frontal lobe damage he had essentially
no
impulse control left and so
you know we rounded on him after surgery
saw that he was doing okay to our you
know first guess at his uh health and we
continued on to see our other patients
and we were called back by his you know
80 year old recovery room nurse saying
you've got to come see your patient
right away something's wrong and we walk
in to see him and he points at his
elderly nurse and says she won't have
sex with me
and you know it was Apparent at that
moment his frontal lobes were gone and
that person is never going to have
reasonable human behavior again
um
and uh that's you know it's one of the
most tragic ways to have a brain
malfunction but uh you know anything a
brain does anything from control of
hormone levels in your body to Vision to
sensation to you know the most obvious
thing which is muscle movement of any
kind from eye movement to moving your
bicep all that comes out of the brain
all of it can go wrong any of it any
part of it or all of it
um
so yeah working with the brain is the
substance of the brain as a surgeon very
high stakes but you know once in a while
you get a chance to really help you get
a chance to fix something that seems
unfixable and you have you know
lazarus-like Miracles not not too
uncommonly so it's extremely satisfying
as a career
could you share with us one of the more
satisfying experiences or perhaps the
top Contour of what um qualifies as
satisfying in in neurosurgery yeah
um you know one of the relatively newer
techniques that we do is you know if
someone comes in with a reasonably small
tumor somewhere deep in the brain that's
hard to get to the traditional approach
to taking that out would involve cutting
through a lot of good normal brain and
disrupting a lot of neurons a lot of
white matter that you know kind of the
wires connecting neurons
um then the modern approach involves a
two millimeter drill hole in the skull
down which you can pass a little fiber
optic uh cannula and and uh attach it to
a laser and just heat the tumor up deep
inside the brain under direct MRI
visualization in real time so your this
person is in the MRI scanner you're
taking pictures every second or so as
the tumor heats up you can monitor the
temperature and get it exactly where you
want it where it's going to kill all
those tumor cells but not hurt hardly
any of the brains surrounding it and so
not uncommonly nowadays we have someone
come in with a tumor that previously
would have been catastrophic to operate
on and we can eliminate that tumor with
you know leaving a poke hole in their
skin
with almost no visual After Effects so
that procedure that you just described
translates into better clinical outcomes
meaning fewer let's call them side
effects or collateral damage exactly
right yeah we don't you know even in
cases that previously would have
considered totally inoperable say a
tumor in the brain stem or a tumor in
primary motor cortex or primary verbal
areas Brokers area
uh where we would have expected to
either not operate or do catastrophic
damage those people sometimes now are
coming out unscathed
I'm very curious about the sorts of
basic information about brain function
that can be gleaned from these clinical
approaches of lesions and
um strokes and um maybe even stimulation
so for instance in your example of this
patient that had bilateral frontal
damage
what do you think his lack of Regulation
reveals about the normal functioning of
the frontal lobes because I think the
obvious answer to most people is going
to be well the frontal lobes are
normally
um
limiting impulsivity right but as we
both know because the brain has
excitatory and inhibitory neurons to
sort of accelerators and breaks on
communication right that isn't
necessarily the straightforward answer
um it could be for instance that the
frontal lobes are acting as conductors
right and are kind of
um important but not the immediate
players in determining impulsivity so
um two questions really what do you
think the frontal lobes are doing
because I'm very intrigued by this uh
human expanded real estate we have a lot
of it compared to other animals and more
generally what do you think damage of a
given neural tissue
means in terms of understanding the
basic function of that tissue yeah it
varies I think from tissue to tissue but
with respect to the frontal lobes I
think they act as sort of a filter they
selectively are saying
backward to the rest of the brain behind
them
when part of your brain says that looks
very attractive I want to go grab it and
take it you know out of the jewelry
display case or you know whatever
the frontal lobes are saying
you can if you go pay for it first right
they're filtering the behavior they're
they're letting the impulse through
maybe uh but in a controlled way
um this is very high level very broad uh
thinking about how the frontal lobes
work and that
that patient I mentioned earlier is a
great example of when they go wrong you
know he had this impulse sort of strange
impulse to be attracted to his nurse
that normally it would be easy for our
frontal lobes to say this is completely
inappropriate wrong setting wrong person
wrong time
uh
in his case he had nothing there and so
even the slightest inclination to uh to
want something came right out to the
surface so
um yeah a filter calming the rest of the
brain down from acting on every possible
impulse when I was a graduate student I
was um running what are called you know
these uh what these are but just to
inform you what are called acutes which
are
um neurophysiological experiments that
last several days because at the end you
uh you terminate the animal this isn't
uh my apologies to those that um are
made uncomfortable by animal research I
now work on humans so a different type
of animal but at the time we were
running these acutes that would start
one day and maybe end two or three days
later and so you get a lot of data the
animals anesthetized and doesn't feel
any pain the entire time of the surgery
but the um one consequence of these
experiments is that the experimenter me
and another individual are awake for
several days with an hour of sleep here
an hour of sleep there but you're
basically awake for two three days
something that really I could only do in
my teens and 20s I was in my 20s at the
time and I recall
um going to eat at a diner after one of
these experiments and I was very hungry
and the waitress walking by with a tray
full of food for another table
and it took every bit of self-control to
not get up and take the food off the
tray something that of course is totally
inappropriate and I would never do and
it must have been based on what you just
said that my forebrain was essentially
going offline or offline from the sleep
deprivation right because there was a
moment there where I thought I might
reach up and grab a plate of food
passing by simply because I wanted it
right and um I didn't
um but I can relate to the experience of
feeling like the shh response is a
flickering in and out under conditions
of sleep deprivation so do we know
whether or not sleep deprivation limits
for brain activity in a similar kind of
way you know I I don't know specifically
if that effect is more pronounced in the
forebrain as opposed to other brain
regions but it's clear that sleep
deprivation has broad effects all over
the brain people start to see visual
hallucinations so the opposite end of
the brain as you know the visual cortex
in the far back
the brain is affected people People's
Court motor coordination goes down after
sleep deprivation so
um I think you know if I if you force me
to give a definitive answer on that
question I'd have to guess that the
entire brain is affected by sleep
deprivation and it's not clear that one
part of the brain is more effective than
another
so we've been talking about damage to
the brain and inferring function from
damage uh maybe we could talk a little
bit about what I consider really the
Holy Grail of the nervous system which
is neuroplasticity this incredible
capacity of the nervous system to change
its wiring strengthen connections weaken
connections maybe new neurons but
probably more strengthening and
weakening of connections right nowadays
we hear a lot of excitement about
so-called classical psychedelics like
LSD and psilocybin which do seem to
quote unquote open plasticity they do a
bunch of other things too but
um through the release of
neuromodulators like serotonin and so
forth
how do you think about neuroplasticity
and more specifically
what do you think the potential for
neuroplasticity is in the adult so let's
say older than 25 year old brain
with or without
machines being involved because
um in your role at neurolink and as a
neurosurgeon in other clinical settings
surely you are using machines and surely
you've seen plasticity in the positive
and negative direction right
what do you think about plasticity
what's possible there without machines
what's possible with machines so as you
mentioned or alluded to the plasticity
definitely goes down in older brains
uh it it is harder for older people to
learn new things to make radical changes
in their behavior uh to you know kick
habits that they've had for years
um
machines aren't the obvious answer so
implanted electrodes and computers
aren't the obvious answer to increased
plasticity necessarily compared to
drugs we already know that there are
pharmacologics some of the ones you
mentioned psychedelics that have a broad
impact on plasticity yeah it's hard to
know which area of the brain would be
most potent as a stimulation Target for
an electrode to broadly juice plasticity
compared to uh you know pharmacologic
agents that we already know about
I think with plasticity you're talking
in general you're talking about the
entire brain you're talking about
altering you know a trillion synapses
all in a similar way in their tendency
to be rewireable to their tendency to be
up or down weighted and
an electrical stimulation Target in the
brain necessarily has to be focused you
know with a device like potentially
neural links there might be a more broad
ability to steer current to multiple
targets with some degree of control but
you're never going to get that broad
um Target ability with uh
any electrodes that I can see coming in
our lifetimes so say that would be
coding the entire surface and depth of
the brain the way that a drug can and so
I think plasticity research will bear
the most fruit when it focuses on
pharmacologic agents I wasn't expecting
that answer given that you're at neural
link and um and then again I think that
all of us me included need to take a
step back and realize that while we may
think we know what is going on at
neurolink in terms of the specific goals
and the general goals and I certainly
have in mind I think most people have in
mind a chip implanted in the brain or
maybe even the peripheral nervous system
that can
give people super memories or some other
augmented capacity we really don't know
what you all are doing there and for all
we know um you guys are taking or
administering psilocybin and combining
that with stimulation I mean we really
don't know and I say this
um with a with a tone of excitement
because
um I think that one of the things that's
so exciting about the different
Endeavors that Elon has really
spearheaded
um SpaceX Tesla Etc is that early on
there's there's a lot of Mystique right
you know Mystique is a quality that
um is not often talked about but
um it's I think a very exciting time in
which
Engineers are starting to toss up big
problems and go for it and obviously
Elon is
certainly among the best if not the best
in terms of going really big I mean Mars
seems pretty far to me right electric
cars are all over the road nowadays are
very different than the picture a few
years ago right when you didn't see so
many of them
rockets and so forth and now the brain
so
to the extent that you are allowed could
you share with us what your vision for
the missions at neurolink are and what
the general scope of missions are and
then
um if possible uh share with us some of
the more specific goals I can imagine
basic goals of trying to understand the
brain and augment the brain I could
imagine clinical goals of trying to
repair things in humans that are
suffering in some way or animals for
that matter yeah it's it's funny what
you mentioned uh
neuralink and I think Tesla and SpaceX
before it end up being these blank
canvases that people project their hopes
and fears onto and so we we experience a
lot of upside in this people you know
assume that we have superpowers in our
ability to alter the way brains work and
people have terrifying fears of the
horrible things we're going to do
uh for the most part those extremes are
not true uh you know we are making a
neural implant we have a robotic
insertion device that helps Place tiny
electrodes the size uh smaller than the
size of a human hair all throughout a
small region of the brain in in the
first indication that we're aiming at we
are hoping to implant a series of these
electrodes into the brains of people
that have had a bad spinal cord injury
so people that are essentially
quadriplegic they have perfect brains
but they can't move use them to move
their body they can't move their arms or
legs because of some high-level spinal
cord damage exactly right and so this
you know pristine motor cortex up in
their brain is completely capable of
operating a human body it's just not
wired properly any longer to a human's
arms or legs and so our goal is to place
this implant into a motor cortex and
have that person be able to then control
a computer so a mouse and a keyboard as
if they had their hands on a mouse and a
keyboard even though they aren't moving
their hands their motor intentions are
coming directly out of the brain into
the device and so they're able to regain
their digital freedom uh and connect
with the world through the internet
why use robotics to insert these chips
and the reason I asked that is that sure
I can imagine that a robot could be more
precise
or less precise but in theory more
precise than the human hand no tremor
for instance right
um uh more Precision in terms of uh
maybe even a little micro detection
device on the the tip of the blade or or
something that could detect a capillary
that you would want to avoid and swerve
around that the human eye couldn't
detect and you and I both know however
that no two brains nor are the two sides
of the same brain
identical right so navigating through
the brain is perhaps best carried out by
a human however and here I'm going to
interrupt myself again and say
10 years ago face recognition
was very clearly performed better by
humans than machines and I think now
machines do it better right so is this
the idea that eventually or maybe even
now robots are better surgeons than
humans are in in this limited case yes
uh these electrodes are so tiny and the
blood vessels on the surface of the
brain so numerous and so densely packed
that a human physically can't do this a
human hand is not steady enough to grab
this you know couple Micron width Loop
uh at the end of our electrode thread
and place it accurately uh blindly by
the way into the cortical surface
accurately enough at the right depth to
get through all the cortical layers that
we want to reach
and
I would love if human surgeons were you
know essential to this process
but very soon humans run out of motor
skills sufficient to do this job and so
we are required in this case to lean on
robots to do this incredibly precise uh
incredibly fast incredibly numerous
placement of electrodes into the right
area of the brain so in some ways
neurolink is pioneering the development
of robotic surgeons as much as it's
pioneering the exploration and
augmentation and treatment of human
brain conditions right and as the device
exists currently as we're submitting it
to the FDA it is only for the placement
of the electrodes the the robot it's
part of the surgery I or or another
neurosurgeon still needs to do the you
know the more crude part of opening the
skin and skull and presenting the
robotic pristine brain surface to sew
Electric threads into
well surely getting quadriplegics to be
able to move again or maybe even to walk
again is a um heroic goal and one that I
think everyone would agree would be
wonderful to accomplish is that the
first goal because it's hard but doable
right
um or is that the first goal because you
and Elon and other folks at neurolink
have a passion for getting paralyzed
people to move again yeah broadly
speaking you know the mission of
neuralink is to reduce human suffering
at least in the near term you know
there's hope that eventually there's a
use here that makes sense for a brain
interface to bring AI as a tool embedded
in the brain that a human can use to
augment their capabilities I think
that's pretty far down the road for us
but definitely on a desired roadmap in
the near term we really are focused on
people with terrible medical problems
that have no options right now
with regard to motor control
you know our mutual friend recently
departed Krishna shenoy was a giant in
this field of motor prosthesis it just
so happens that his work was
foundational for a lot of people that
work in this area including us and he
was an advisor to neuralink
um that work was farther along than most
other work for addressing any function
that lives on the surface of the brain
the physical constraints of our approach
require us currently to focus on only
surface features on the brain so we
can't say go to the really
um
very compelling surface deep depth
functions that happen in the brain like
you know mood appetite addiction pain
sleep we'd love to get to that place
eventually but in the immediate future
our first indication or two or three
will probably be brain surface functions
like motor control
I'd like to take a quick break and
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those listening the outer portions of
the brain are
filled with or consist of rather
neocortex so the the bumpy stuff that
looks like sea coral some forms of sea
coral look like brains or brains look
like them and then underneath uh reside
a lot of the brain structures that
control what Matt just referred to um
things controlling mood hormone output
how awake or asleep the brain is
um and would you agree that those deeper
regions of the brain have in some ways
more predictable functions I mean that
lesions there or stimulation there lead
to more predictable outcomes in terms of
deficits or improvements in function
yeah in some way yes I mean the the
deeper parts of the brain tend to be
more stereotyped as in more similar
between species than the the outer
surface of the brain they're kind of the
firmware or the the housekeeping
functions to some degree body
temperature blood pressure sex
motivation
hunger or things that you don't really
need to vary dramatically between a fox
and a human being
whereas the the outer more reasoning
functions of problem-solving functions
between a fox and a human are vastly
different and so the physical
requirements of those brain outputs are
different
I think I heard Elon describe it as the
human brain is I'm essentially a monkey
brain with a super computer placed on
the outside which
um sparked some interesting ideas about
what neocortex is doing we have all this
brain real estate on top of all that
more stereotyped function type stuff in
the deeper brain and it's still unclear
what neocortex is doing in the case of
frontal cortex as you mentioned earlier
it's clear that it's um providing some
quieting of of impulses some context
setting rule setting context switching
all of that makes good sense but then
there are a lot of cortical areas that
sure involved in Vision or touch or
hearing but then there's also a lot of
real estate that just feels un
unexplored right so I'm curious whether
or not in your clinical work or work
with neural link
um or both whether or not you have ever
encountered neurons
that do something that's really peculiar
and intriguing
um and here I'm referring to examples
that could be anywhere in the brain yeah
like where you go wow like these neurons
when I stimulate them or when they're
taken away lead to something kind of
bizarre but interesting yeah yeah
there's
um the one that comes immediately to
mind is unfortunately in a terrible case
in kids that have a tumor in the
hypothalamus that lead to what we call
gelastic seizures which is sort of an
uncontrollable fit of laughter there's
been cases in the literature where this
laughter is so uncontrollable and so
pervasive that people suffocate from
failing to breathe where they laugh
until they pass out
and so you know you don't normally think
of a deep structure in the brain like
the hypothalamus as being involved in
the you know a function like
humor and and certainly when we think
about this kind of laughter in these
kids with tumors it's
mirthless laughter is the the kind of
textbook phrase
humorless laughter it's just a reflexive
um almost
zombie-like behavior and
it comes from a very small population of
neurons deep in the brain this is one of
the other sort of strange
loss of functions you might say is you
know it's it's nice that you and I can
sit here and not have constant uh
disruptive fits of laughter coming out
of our bodies but that that's a neuronal
function that's you know thank goodness
due to neurons properly wired and
properly functioning and any neurons
that do anything like this can be broken
and so we see this in horrifying cases
like that from time to time
so I'm starting to sense that there are
two broad bins of approaches to
augmenting the brain either to treat
disease or for sake of increasing memory
creating super brains Etc one category
you alluded to earlier which is
pharmacology and you specifically
mentioned that the tremendous power that
pharmacology holds right whether or not
it's through psychedelics or through
prescription drug or you know some other
compound
the other approach are these little
microelectrodes that are extremely
strategically placed right into multiple
regions in order to play essentially a
concert of electricity that is exactly
right to get a quadriplegic moving
um
that Sparks two questions first of all
is there a role for and is neural link
interested in combining pharmacology
with stimulation
so not immediately right now we're
solely focused on the extremely hard
some might say the hardest problem
facing humans right now of decoding the
brain through electrical stimulation and
recording that's that's enough for us
for now so um to just uh give us a bit
Fuller picture of this you were talking
about a patient who can't move their
limbs because they've have spinal cord
damage right
um the motor cortex that controls
movement is in theory fine right you
make a small hole in the skull and
through that hole a robot is going to
place electrodes
obviously motor cortex but then where
how is the idea that you're going to
play a concert from different locations
you're going to hit all the keys on the
piano in different combinations and then
figure out what can move the limbs what
I'm alluding to here is I still don't
understand how the signals are going to
get out of motor cortex past the lesion
and into
um and out to the limbs because the
lesion hasn't been dealt with at all in
this scenario so just to clarify there I
I
should emphasize we're not in the
immediate future talking about
reconnecting the brain to the patient's
own limbs that's on the road map but
it's way down the road map a few years
what we're talking about in the
immediate future is having the person be
able to control electronic devices
around them with their motor intentions
alone right so prosthetic hand and arm
or just Mouse and and keys on a mouse
and keys on a keyboard for starters so
you wouldn't see anything in the world
move
uh as they have an intention the patient
might imagine say flexing their fist or
moving their wrist and what would happen
on the screen is the mouse would move
down and left and click on an icon and
bring up their word processor and then a
keyboard at the bottom of the screen
would allow them to you know select
letters in sequence and they could type
this is the easy place to start easy in
quotes I would say because
um the transformation of electrical
signals from motor cortex through the
brain stem into the spinal cord and out
to the muscles is somewhat known right
through 100 years or more of incredible
laboratory research right but the
transformation meaning how to take the
electrical signals out of motor cortex
and put it into a a mouse or a robot arm
that's not a trivial problem I mean that
that's a whole other set of problems in
fact well we're taking we're unloading
some of that difficulty from uh from the
the brain itself from the brain of the
patient and putting some of that into
software so we're using smarter
algorithms to decode the motor
intentions out of the brain we have been
able to do this in monkeys really well
so we have you know a small army of
monkeys playing video games for you know
smoothie rewards and they do really well
we we actually have the world record of
a bit rate of information coming out of
a monkey's brain to you know
intelligently control a cursor on a
screen we're doing that better than
anyone else
and you know again thanks in no small
part due to Krishna shenoi and his you
know his lab and the people that have
worked for him that have been helping
neuralink
um but what you can't do with that
monkey is ask him what what he's
thinking you can't ask him we can ask
him but he won't get a very interesting
answer yeah
you can't tell him to try something
different you can't tell him to hey you
know try their shoulder on this early
try the other hand and see if there's
some cross body uh neuron firing that
that gives you a useful signal once we
get to people
we expect to see what they've seen when
they've done similar work in academic
Labs which is the the human can work
with you to vastly accelerate this
process and get much more interesting
results so one of the things out of out
of Stanford recently is
there was a lab that with Krishna and
Jamie Henderson and other people decode
speech out of the hand movement area in
the brain so what we know is that there
are
you know multitudes of useful signals in
each area of the brain that we've looked
at so far they just tend to be highly
expressed for say hand movement in the
hand area but that doesn't mean only
hand movement in the hand area
okay so here's the confidence test
there's a long history
uh dating back really prior to the 1950s
of scientists doing experiments on
themselves sure
not because they are Reckless but
because they want the exact sorts of
information that you're talking about
the ability to really understand how
intention and awareness of goals can
shape outcomes in biology if that is
vague to people listening what I mean
here is that for many probably hundreds
of years if not longer scientists have
taken the drugs they've studied or
stimulated their own brain or done
things to really try and get a sense of
what the animals they work on or the
patients they work on might be
experiencing psychiatrists are sort of
famous for this by the way right I'm not
pointing fingers at anybody but
psychiatrists are known to try the drugs
that they administer right and some
people would probably imagine that's a
good thing just so that the clinicians
could have empathy for the sorts of side
effects and not so great effects of some
of these drugs that they administer to
to patients but
the confidence test
I present you is
would you be willing or are you willing
if allowed to have these electrodes
implanted into your motor cortex yeah
you're not a quadriplegic right you can
move your limbs yeah but
given the state of the technology at
neurolink now
would you do that or maybe in the next
couple of years if you were allowed
would you be willing to do that yeah and
be the person to say hey turn up the
stimulation over there I feel like I
want to reach for the cup right with
that robotic arm but I'm feeling kind of
some resistance because it's exactly
that kind of experiment done on a a
person who can move their limbs and who
deeply understands the technology and
the goals of the experiment that I would
argue actually stands to advance the
technology fastest sure as opposed to
putting the electrodes first into
somebody who
um is imperative a number of levels and
then trying to think about why things
aren't working right right and again
that you know this is all with the the
goal of of reversing paralysis in mind
um but would you implant yourself with
these microelectrodes yeah absolutely I
I would be excited to do that I think
for the first iteration of the device it
probably wouldn't be very meaningful it
wouldn't be very useful because I can
still move my limbs and our first
outputs from this are things that I can
do just as easily with my hands right
moving a mouse typing in a keyboard
um we are necessarily making this device
as a medical device for starters for
people with bad medical problems and no
good options
it wouldn't really make sense for an
able-bodied person to get one in the
near term
it as the technology develops and we
make devices specifically designed to
perform functions that can't be done
even by an able-bodied person
say eventually refine the technique to
get to the point where you can type
faster with your mind and one of these
devices than you can with text to speech
or speech to text and your fingers
that's a use case that makes sense for
someone like me to get it it doesn't
really make sense for me to you know get
one when it allows me to you know use a
mouse slightly worse than I can with my
hand currently that said the safety of
the device I would absolutely vouch for
from you know the hundreds of surgeries
that I've personally done with this I I
think it's much safer than many of the
industry standard FDA approved surgeries
that I routinely do on on patients that
you know are no one even thinks twice
about their standard of care neurolink
is already reached in my mind a safety
threshold that is far beyond a commonly
accepted safety threshold
along the lines of augmenting one's
biological function or functions in the
world I think now's the appropriate time
to talk about the small lump uh present
in the top of your hand for those
listening not watching there's a it
looks like a a small lump between
um
Dr mcdougall's forefinger and thumb or
index finger and thumb
um placed on skin on the top of his hand
you've had this for some years now
because we've known each other for gosh
probably seven years now or so and
you've always had it in the time that
I've known you what is that lump
um and why did you put it in there yeah
so it's a small writable RFID tag what's
an RFID what does RFID stand for yeah
radio frequency identification and so
it's just a very small implantable chip
that wireless devices can temporarily
power if you approach an antenna they
can power and send a small amount of
data back and forth so most phones have
the capability of reading and writing to
this chip for years it it let me into my
house it unlocked a deadbolt on my front
door
for some years it unlocked the doors at
neuralink and let me through you know
the the various locked doors inside the
building
um
it is writable I can write a small
amount of data to it and so for some
some years in early uh the early days of
crypto I had a crypto private key
written on it to store a cryptocurrency
that I thought was you know a dead
offshoot of one of the main uh crypto
currencies after it forked and so I put
the private wallet key on there and
forgot about it and remembered a few
years later that it was there and went
and checked and it was worth you know a
few thousand dollars more than when I
had left it on there so that was a nice
finding change in the sofa in the 21st
century and then when you say you read
it you're essentially taking a a phone
or other device and scanning it over the
the lump in your hand so to speak and
then it can read the data from there
yeah essentially yeah um what other
sorts of things could one put into these
rfids in theory and how long can they
stay in there before you need to take
them out and um yeah and recharge them
or replace them well these are passive
they're coded in
biocompatible glass and as an extra I'm
a rock climber and so I was worried
about that glass shattering during rock
climbing I additionally coated them in
another ring of silicone before
implanting that so it's it's pretty safe
they're passive there's no battery
there's no Active Electronics in them so
they could last the rest of my life I
don't think I'd ever have to remove it
for any reason you know at some point
the technology is always improving so I
might remove it and upgrade it
that's not inconceivable already there's
you know 10x more storage versions
available that could be a drop in
replacement for this if I ever remove it
but you know that it it has a small
Niche use case and it's an interesting
proof of concept tiptoeing towards the
concept that you mentioned of you know
you have to be willing to go through the
things that you're suggesting to your
patients in order to you know say with a
straight face that you think this is a
reasonable thing to do
so a small subcutaneous implant in the
hand is a little different than a brain
implant but yeah what's involved in
getting that RFID chip into the hand is
it I'm assuming it's an outpatient
procedure presumably you did it on
yourself yeah yeah this was a kitchen
table kind of procedure
um any anesthetic or is or no you know I
um I've seen people do this with
lidocaine injection I for my money I
think a lidocaine injection is probably
as painful as just doing the procedures
a little cut in that thin skin on the
top of the hand right some people are
cringing right now other people are
saying I want one because you'll have to
never worry about losing your keys yeah
or passwords I actually would like them
for passwords because I'm dreadfully bad
at uh remembering passwords I have to
put them in places uh all over the place
and then it's like I'm like that kid in
um remember that movie Stand by me where
the kid hides the pennies under the the
porch and then uses the map yeah spends
all summer trying to wind them so I can
relate uh yeah so a little it was just a
little slit and then put in there no
local immune response no no pus no
swelling all the materials are
completely biocompatible that are on the
surface exposed to the body so no no bad
reaction it healed up you know in days
and it was fine very cool um since we're
on video here maybe can you just uh
maybe raise it and show us yeah so so
were you not to point out uh that little
lump I I would have known to to ask
about it but and uh any other members of
your family have have these a few years
after having this and seeing the
convenience of me being able to open the
door without keys uh my wife insisted
that I put one in her as well so she's
walking around with one fantastic we
consider them our sort of our our
version of wedding rings love it well
certainly um more permanent than wedding
rings in in some sense
um
I can't help but ask this question even
though it might seem a little bit off
topic as long as we're talking about
implantable devices and Bluetooth and
RFID chips in the body I get asked a lot
about
um the safety or lack thereof of a
Bluetooth headphones
um you work on the brain you're a brain
surgeon
um that's valuable real estate in there
and um you understand about
electromagnetic fields and sure
um any discussion about emfs immediately
puts us in the category of uh oh like
get their tin foil hats and yet I've
been researching emfs for a future
episode of the podcast sure and emfs are
a real thing that's not a valuable
statement everything's a real thing at
some level even an idea but there does
seem to be some evidence that
electromagnetic fields of sufficient
strength can alter the function of maybe
the health of but the function of neural
tissue given that neural tissue is
electrically signaling among itself so
um I'll just ask this in a very
straightforward way do you use Bluetooth
headphones or wired headphones yeah
Bluetooth and you're not worried about
any kind of EMF Fields across the skull
no I mean I I think the energy levels
involved are so tiny that uh you know
ionizing radiation aside we're way out
of the realm of ionizing radiation that
people would worry about you know tumor
causing EMF Fields
even just the electromagnetic field
itself
as is very well described in a Bluetooth
frequency range the power level are tiny
in these devices and so you know we are
Awash in these signals whether you use
Bluetooth headphones or not for that
matter you're you're getting bombarded
with ionizing radiation in a very tiny
amount no matter where you live on earth
unless you live under huge amounts of
water
um it's unavoidable uh and so I think
you just have to trust that your body
has the DNA repair mechanisms that it
needs to deal with the constant bath of
ionizing radiation that you're in uh as
a result of being in the universe and
exposed to cosmic rays
in terms of electromagnetic fields there
it's just it's uh
you know the energy levels are way way
out of the range where I would be
worried about this what about heat
um you know I don't use the earbuds any
longer for a couple of reasons once as
you know I take a lot of supplements and
I reach into my left pocket once and
swallowed a handful of supplements that
included a Bluetooth a airpod pro
um I knew it I swallowed it the moment
after I
gulped it down by the way folks please
don't do this it was not a good idea it
was it wasn't an idea it was a mistake
and but I could see it on my phone as
registering there never saw it again so
I'm assuming it's no longer in my body
but um uh anyway there's a bad joke
there to be sure
um but in any event I tend to lose them
or misplace them so that's the main
reason but I did notice when I used them
that there's some heat generated there
um I also am not convinced that plugging
your ears all day long is good there's
some ventilation through the through the
sinus systems that include the ears so
it sounds to me like you're not
concerned about the use of of
um earbuds but
um what about heat near the brain I mean
there's the the cochlea the auditory
mechanisms that sit pretty close to the
surface there
um heat and neural tissue are not
friends sure
um I'd much rather get my brain cold
than hot yeah
um in terms of keeping the cells healthy
and Alive
um should we be thinking about the heat
effects of some of these devices or
other things is there anything we're
overlooking well think about it this way
the uh I use cars as an analogy a lot
and you know mostly internal combustion
engine cards so these analogies are
gonna start to be foreign and useless
for another generation of people that
grow up in the era of electric cars but
using cars as a as a platform to talk
about uh
fluid cooling systems your body has a
massive distributed fluid cooling system
similar to a car's radiator
you're pumping blood all around your
body all the time at a very strictly
controlled temperature
that blood carries it's mostly water so
it carries a huge amount of the heat
away or cold away from any area of the
body that's focused heating or focused
cooling so you could put an ice cube on
your skin until it completely melts away
and the blood is going to bring heat
back to that area you can put you can
stand in the sun under
much more scary
heating Rays from the Sun itself that
contain UV radiation that's that's
definitely damaging your DNA if you're
looking for things to be afraid of the
sun is a good one
now you're talking to the guy that tells
everybody he got sunlight in their eyes
every morning but I don't want people to
get burned or give themselves skin
cancer I encourage people to protect
their skin accordingly and and different
individuals require different levels of
protection from the Sun sure some people
do very well in a lot of sunshine never
get basal cell or anything like that
some people and it's not just people
with very fair skin a minimum of sun
exposure can cause some issues and here
I'm talking about sun exposure to the
skin of course staring at the sun is a
bad idea I never recommend thinking
about the sun just as a heater uh you
know for for a moment to compare it with
Bluetooth headphones your body is very
capable of carrying that heat away and
dissipating it you know via sweat
evaporation
or you know temperature Equalization so
any heat that's locally generated in the
ear
you know one there's a pretty large bony
barrier there but two there's a ton of
blood flow in the scalp and in the head
in general and definitely in the brain
that's going to regulate that
temperature so I think certainly there
can be a tiny temperature variation but
I doubt very seriously that it's enough
to cause a significant problem I'd like
to go back to brain augmentation you've
made very clear that one of the first
goals for neurolink is to get
quadriplegics walking again and again
what a marvelous goal that is and I
certainly hope you guys succeed well
again just just to be very clear the
first step is we we aren't reconnecting
the patient's own muscle system to their
motor Court allowing them um excuse me
uh agency over the movement of things in
the world yes and eventually their body
and you're exactly right yeah eventually
their body we would we would love to do
that and we've done a lot of work on uh
developing a system for stimulating the
spinal cord itself and so that gets to
the question that you uh that you asked
a few minutes ago of how do you
reconnect the motor cortex to the rest
of the body well if you can bypass the
damaged area of the spinal cord and have
an implant in the spinal cord itself
connected to an implant in the brain and
have them talking to each other you can
take the perfectly intact motor signals
out of the the motor cortex and send
them to the spinal cord which most of
the wiring should be intact in the
spinal cord below the level of say the
the injury caused by a car accident or
motorcycle accident or gunshot wound or
whatever and it should be possible to
reconnect the brain to the body in that
way so not out of the realm of
possibility that you know in some small
number of years that neuralink will be
able to reconnect to somebody's own body
to their brain
and here I just want to flag the
um 100 years or more of incredible work
by basic scientists
um the names that I learned about in my
textbooks as a graduate student were
like georgeopolis and um that won't mean
anything to anyone unless you're a
neuroscientist but churchopolis um
performed some of the first
sophisticated recordings out of motor
cortex just simply asking like what
sorts of electrical patterns are present
in motor cortex as an animal or human
move is a limb
um Krishna shinoy being another
um major Pioneer in this area and many
others right and just really
highlighting the fact that basic
research where
a exploration of neural tissue is
carried out at the level of anatomy and
physiology really sets down the pavement
on the runway to do the sorts of big
clinical uh Expeditions that you all at
neurolink are doing yeah it can't be
said enough that you know we broadly
speaking in Industry sometimes are and
sometimes stand on the shoulders of
academic Giants they were the real
Pioneers that they were involved in the
grind for years in an unglorious
unglamorous way no stock option no stock
options
and you know the reward uh for all the
hard work is a paper at the end of the
day that is read by you know dozens of
people and so you know they were
selfless uh academic researchers that
that made all this possible and we all
humanity and neuralink owe them a
massive debt of gratitude for all the
hard work that they've done and continue
to do
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along the lines of augmentation early on
in some of the public discussions about
neurolink that I overheard between Elon
and various podcast hosts Etc
there were some lofty ideas set out that
I think are still very much in play in
people's minds things like for instance
electrical stimulation of the
hippocampus that you so appropriately
have worn on your shirt today so for
those they have beautiful um looks like
either a it looks like a Golgi or a
kahal rendition of the hippocampus yeah
translates to seahorse and it's an area
of the brain that's involved in learning
and memory and among other things
there was this idea thrown out that a
chip or chips could be implants in the
hippocampus that would allow greater
than normal memory abilities perhaps
that's one idea sure another idea that I
heard about in these discussions was for
instance that you would have some chips
in your brain and I would have some
chips in my brain and you and I could
just sit here look at he looking at each
other or not nodding or shaking our
heads and essentially hear each other's
thoughts which sounds outrageous but of
course why not why should we constrain
ourselves
um to uh as our good friend Eddie Chang
and uh who's a neurosurgeon who was
already on this podcast once before said
speech is just the shaping of breath as
it exits our lungs incredible really
when you think about it but
we don't necessarily need speech to hear
and understand each other's thoughts
because the neural signals that produce
that shaping of the lungs come from some
intention you know I have some idea
although it might not seem like it about
what I'm going to say next so is that
possible that we could sit here
and just hear each other's thoughts and
um and also how would we restrict what
the other person could hear yeah well so
absolutely I mean think about
the fact that we could do this right now
if you pulled out your phone and started
texting me on my phone and I looked down
and started texting you we would be
communicating without looking at each
other or talking
shifting that function from a phone to
an implanted device it requires no magic
Advance no Leap Forward it's technology
we already know how to do
if we say put a device in that allows
you to control a keyboard and a mouse
which is our stated intention for our
first human clinical trial or and
against I'm deliberately interrupting or
I can text an entire team of people sure
simultaneously and they can text me and
in theory I could have a bunch of
thoughts and
5 10 50 people could hear right
um or um probably more to their
preference um they could talk to me yeah
and and so you know texting each other
with our brains is maybe an uninspiring
rendition of this but it it's not uh
very difficult to imagine the
implementation of the same device in a
more verbally focused area of the brain
that allows you to more naturally speak
the thoughts that you're thinking and
have me have them rendered into speech
that I can hear uh you know maybe via a
bone conducting implant so silently here
or or not silently like I could let's
say I was getting off the plane and I
wanted to let somebody at home know that
I had arrived I might be able to think
in my mind think their first name which
might cue up a device that would then
play my voice to them and just got off
the plane I'm gonna grab my bag and then
I'll give you a call right on their home
Alexa right
so that's all possible meaning we know
the origin of the neural signals that
give us rise to speech we know the
different mechanical and neural apparati
like the cochlea
um eardrums Etc that
transduce sound waves into electrical
signals right essentially all the pieces
are known we're just really talking
about like refining it yeah refining it
and reconfiguring it it's I mean it's
not an easy problem but it's really an
engineering problem rather than a
neuroscience problem for that for that
use case you know for a non-verbal
communication you might say
um that's a solved problem in a very
crude disjointed way uh so some Labs
have solved you know part one of it some
Labs have solved part two of it there
are products out there that solve you
know say the implanted bone conduction
part of it for the for the deaf
Community
um
there are there are no implementations
I'm aware of that are pulling all that
together into one product that's a
streamlined package from end to end I
think that's a few years down the road
and we I think have some hints of how
easily or poorly people will adapt to
these um let's call them novel
Transformations a few years ago I was on
Instagram and I saw a post from a woman
um her name is cassar Jacobson and she
is deaf since birth and can sign and to
some extent can relapse but she was
um
discussing uh neosensory so this is a a
device that translates sound in the
environment into touch Sensations on her
hand or wrist she's a uh admirer of
birds and all things Avian and
um I reached out to her about this
device because I'm very curious because
this is a very interesting use case of
of neuroplasticity in the sensory domain
which is a fascination of mine and she
said that
um yes indeed it afforded her novel
experiences now when walking past say
pigeons in the park if they were to make
some whatever sounds that pigeons make
that she would feel those sounds and
that indeed it enriched her experience
of those birds
um in ways that obviously it wouldn't
otherwise I haven't followed up with her
recently to find out whether or not
ongoing use of neosensory has made for a
better
worse or kind of um
equivalent experience of avians in the
world which were her is a near Obsession
um so she Delights in them
um what are your thoughts about in a
peripheral devices like that periphery
peripheral meaning outside of the the
skull no requirement for a uh a surgery
do you think that there's a more
immediate or even a uh just generally
potent
um use case for peripheral devices and
do you think that those are going to be
used more readily before the kind of
brain surgery requiring devices are used
yeah
um certainly the barrier to entry is
lower the barrier to adoption is low you
know if you're making a tactile glove
that's
hard to say no to when you can slip it
on and slip it off and not not have to
get your skin cut at all
um
what you know again there's no perfect
measure of the efficacy of a device of
one device compared to another
especially across modalities but one one
way that you can start to compare apples
to oranges is bitrate you know useful
information in or out of the brain as
you know transformed into digital data
and so you can put a single number on
that and you have to ask when you look
at a device like that is what is the bit
rate in what is the bit rate out how
much information are you able to
usefully convey into the system and get
out of the system into the body into the
brain and uh I think there's what we've
seen in the early stabs at this is that
there's a very low threshold for bit
rate on some of the devices that are
trying to avoid you know a direct brain
surgery Could you um perhaps say what
you just said but in a way that um maybe
people who aren't as familiar with
thinking about bitrate might um
might be able to digest there I'm
referring to myself
um I mean I understand bitrate I
understand that adding a new channel of
information is just that adding
information are you saying it's
important to understand whether or not
that new information provides for novel
function or experience and to and
um to what extent is the the newness of
that valid and adaptive well I'm saying
more uh
it's hard to measure utility in this
space it's hard to you know put a single
metric single number on how useful a
technology is
one crude way to try to get at that is
is uh bit rate think of it as as back in
the days of dial-up modems the bit rate
of your modem was you know 56k or 96 I
can still hear the sound of the dial up
in the background
yeah that was a bit rate that thankfully
kept steadily going up and up and up
your your internet service provider
gives you a number uh that is the
maximum usable data that you can
transmit back and forth from the
internet that's a useful way to think
about these assistive devices how much
information are you able to get in into
the brain and out of the brain usefully
and right now that that number is very
small even compared to the old modems
but you have to ask yourself when you're
looking at a technology what's the
ceiling what's the theoretical maximum
and for a lot of these Technologies the
theoretical maximum is is very low
disappointingly low even if it's
perfectly executed and and perfect
developed as a technology and I think
the thing that attracts a lot of us to a
technology like neuraling is that the
ceiling is incredibly High there's no
obvious reason that you can't interface
with millions of neurons as this
technology is refined and and developed
further so that's the kind of wide band
you know high bandwidth brain interface
that you want to develop if you're
talking about
um and a semantic prosthetic uh an AI
assistant to your cognitive abilities uh
you know the more sci-fi things that we
think about in the coming decades
um
so uh it's an important caveat when
you're evaluating these Technologies
they really want it to be something that
you can expand off into the Sci-Fi
so let's take this a step further
because as you're saying this I'm
realizing that people have been doing
exactly what neurolink is trying to do
now for a very long time let me give you
an example
um
people who are blind who have no pattern
Vision have used canes for a very long
time now the cane is not a chip it's not
a an electrode it's not neosensory right
none of that stuff
what it is is essentially a a stick that
has
um
an interface with a surface so it swept
back and forth across the ground and
you're translating what would otherwise
be visual cues into
somatosensory cues sure and we know that
blind people are very good at
understanding
um even when they are approaching say a
curb Edge because they are integrating
that information from the tip of the
cane
um up through their somatosensory cortex
and their motor cortex with other things
like the changes in the the wind and the
sound as they round a corner and um here
I'm imagining a like a corner in San
Francisco downtown which you get to the
corner it's a completely different set
of auditory cues
and very often we know and this is
because my laboratory worked on visual
repair for a long time I talked to a lot
of blind people who use different
devices to navigate the world that they
aren't aware of the fact that they're
integrating these other cues but they
nonetheless do them subconsciously right
um and in doing so get pretty good at
navigating with a cane right now Kane
isn't perfect but you can imagine the
other form of of navigating as a blind
person uh which is to just attach
yourself
or attached to you another nervous
system the best that we know being a dog
sighted dog sure that can cue you again
with a stopping at a curb's edge or even
if there are some individuals that might
seem a little sketchy dogs are also very
good at sensing
um different uh arousal States and
others threat danger sure I mean they're
Exquisite at it right so here what we're
really talking about is taking a cane or
another biological system essentially a
whole nervous system and saying this
other nervous system's job is to get you
to navigate more safely through the
world right in some sense what neurolink
is trying to do is that but with
robotics to insert them and chips which
raises the the question people are going
to say finally a question the question
is this we hear about
BMI brain machine interface which is
really what neuraling specializes in we
also hear about AI another example where
there's great promise and great fear
right we hear about machine learning as
well to what extent can these brain
machine interfaces
learn the same way a seeing eye dog
would learn but unlike a seeing eye dog
continue to learn over time and get
better and better and better because
it's also listening to the nervous
system that it's trying to support right
put simply what is the role for AI and
machine learning in the type of work
that you're doing that's a great
question I think you know it goes both
ways basically what you're doing is
taking a very crude software
intelligence I would say not exactly a
full full-blown AI but it's some
well-designed software that can adapt to
changes in firing of the brain and
you're coupling it with another form of
intelligence a human intelligence and
you're allowing the two to learn each
other so undoubtedly the human that has
a neuralink device will get better at
using it over time undoubtedly the
software that the neurolink engineers
have written will adapt to the firing
patterns that that the device is able to
record and over time focus in on
meaningful signals toward movement right
so if a neuron is fire a high firing
rate when you intend to move the mouse
cursor up and to the right
it doesn't know that when it starts when
you first put this in it's just a random
series of signals as far as the chip
knows but you start correlating it with
what the person what you know the person
wants to do as expressed in a series of
games so you you assume that
you know that the person wants to move
the mouse on the screen to the Target
that's shown because you tell them
that's the goal and so you start
correlating the activity
that you record when they're moving
toward an up and right Target on a
screen with that firing pattern and
similarly for up and left down and left
down and right and so you develop a
model
um
semi-intelligently in the software for
what the person is intending to do and
let the person run wild with it for a
while and they start to get better at
using the model presented to them by the
by the software as expressed by the
mouse moving or not moving properly on
the screen right so it's imagine a
scenario where you're asking somebody to
play piano but
the the sound that comes out of each key
randomly shifts over time
um very difficult problem but a human
brain is good enough with the aid of
software to solve that problem and and
map well enough to a semi-stable state
that they're going to know how to use
that Mouse even when they say turn the
device off for the night come back to it
the next day and some of the signals
have shifted so you're describing this
I'm I'm recalling a recent experience I
got one of these um rowers you know for
to exercise and I am well aware that
there's a proper row stroke and there's
a improper row stroke and most everybody
including me who's never been coached in
rowing gets on this thing and pushes
with their legs and pulls with their
arms and back and it's some mix of
Incorrect and maybe a smidgen of correct
type execution
there's a function within the rower that
allows
you in this case I mean to play a game
where you can actually
um every row stroke you generate arrows
on toward a dartboard and it knows
whether or not you're generating the
appropriate forces at the given segment
to the row the initial pull when you're
leaning back Etc and adjusts the
trajectory of the arrow so that when you
do a proper row stroke it gets closer to
a bullseye and it's very satisfying
because you now have a visual feedback
that's unrelated to this
um the kinds of instructions that one
would expect like oh you know hinge your
hip a bit more or you know splay your
knees a bit more reach more with your
arms or pull first with your back all
the rowers are probably cringing as I
say this because they're realizing the
what is exactly the point which is I
don't know how to row but over time
simply by paying attention to whether or
not the arrow is hitting the bullseye or
not more or less frequently
you can improve your row stroke and get
as I understand pretty close to Optimal
row stroke
in the same way that if you had a coach
there telling you hey do this and do
that what we're really talking about
here is neurobiofeedback sure so is that
analogy similar to what you're
describing yeah that's a great analogy
you know humans are really good at
learning how to play games in software
so video games are an awesome platform
for us to use as a training environment
for people to get better at controlling
these things in fact it's it's the
default and the obvious way to do it is
to have people and monkeys play video
games do you play video games yeah sure
which video games
let's see I you know play old ones I'm a
little nostalgic so uh I uh like the old
Blizzard game Starcraft and Warcraft I
don't even know those I remember the
first Apple computers I mean I go how
old are you uh 43 okay 44 now as of a
few days ago happy birthday so we're a
little bit offset there yeah I can
recall um Mike Tyson's punch out like
the original Nintendo game Super Mario
Brothers
um but the game so the games you're
describing I don't recall that my
understanding is that the newer games
are are far more sophisticated in some
respects I I did recently find time to
play cyberpunk
um which was really satisfying and maybe
appropriate
it's a game where the characters are all
fully modded out with cybernetic
implants well perfect um but you know
the the root of the game is run around
and shoot things so maybe not so
different from you know duck hunt or
whatever from our childhoods
the reason I ask about video games is um
there's been some controversy as to
whether or not they are making young
brains better or worse and I think some
of the work from Adam gazzali's Lab at
UCSF and other Laboratories have shown
that actually provided that um
children in particular and adults are
also spending time in normal face to
let's call them more traditional
face-to-face interactions that video
games can actually make nervous systems
that is people a much more proficient at
learning and motor execution sure
um visual detection
um and on and on yeah there's some work
uh showing that surgeons are better if
they play video games so I try to
squeeze some in as a you know a
professional development activity great
great well I'm sure you're getting
cheers from the uh from those that like
video games out there and some of the
parents who are trying to get their kids
to play fewer video games are cringing
but that's okay we'll let them settle uh
they're familial disputes among
themselves
let's talk about pigs sure
neural link has been
um quite generous I would say in
announcing their discoveries and their
goals and I I want to highlight this
because I think it's quite unusual for a
company to do this
um I'm probably going to earn a few
enemies by saying this
um despite the fact that I've always
owned Apple devices and from the South
Bay
um you know the apple design team is
notoriously cryptic about what they're
going to do next or when the next phone
or computer is going to come out is is
is vaulted to
um a serious extent neural link has been
pretty open about their goals right with
the understanding the goals change and
have to change and one of the things
that they've done which I think is
marvelous is they've held online
symposia
where you and some other colleagues of
mine from the Neuroscience committee Dan
Adams who have tremendous respect for
and Elon and others their neural link
have shared some of the progress that
they've made in experimental animals I'm
highlighting this because I think if one
takes a step back I mean just for most
people to
know about and realize that there's
experimentation on animals implantation
of electrodes and so on is itself a
pretty bold move because that
understandably evokes some strong
emotions
um in people and in some people evokes
extremely strong emotions sure
um
neural link did one such Symposium where
they showed implant devices in pigs
right
then they did another one you guys did
another one where it was implant devices
in monkeys right I assume at some point
there will be one of these public
symposia where
um the implant devices will be in a
human
what was the rationale for using pigs
I'm told pigs are very nice creatures
yeah I'm told that they are quite smart
right
um and
for all my years as a neuroscientist and
having worked admittedly on every
species from mice to cuttlefish to
humans to hamsters to uh you know I
confess um various carnivore species
which I no longer do I work on humans
now for various reasons I never in my
life thought I would see a implant
device in the cortex of a pig sure why
work on pigs yeah well let me let me say
first neurolink is almost entirely
composed of animal loving people the
people at norlink are
obsessive animal lovers there are signs
up all around the office you know
spontaneously put up by people within
the organization you know talking about
how we want to save animals we want to
protect animals
if there was any possible way
to help people the way we want to help
people without using animals in our
research we would do it it's just not
known how to do that right now and so we
are completely restricted to making
advances to getting a device approval
through the FDA by first showing that
it's incredibly safe in animals
and so as is the case for any medical
advancement essentially exactly I do
want to highlight this that the the FDA
and the other governing bodies
um
oversee these types of experiments and
ensure that they're done with a minimum
of discomfort to the animals of course
but
um I think there's an inherent
speciesism right in uh in most humans
not all some people truly see
equivalence between a lizard and a human
lizard life being equivalent to human
life most human beings I think in
particular human beings who themselves
or have loved ones that are suffering
from diseases that they hope could be
cured at some point view themselves as
species and feel that if you have to
work on a biological system
in order to solve the problem
um working on non-human animals first
makes sense right to most people sure
but certainly there's a category of
people that feels very strongly in the
opposite direction sure and you know I
think we would probably be having a very
different conversation around animal
research if uh we weren't you know we as
a species we as a culture weren't just
casually
slaughtering millions of animals to eat
them
um
every single day and so that is a
background against which that the
relatively minuscule number of animals
used in research it becomes almost
impossible to understand why someone
would point to that ridiculously small
number of animals used in research when
the vast vast majority of animals that
humans use and end their lives are are
done for food or for fur or for fur or
these other reasons that people you know
have historically used animals so we in
in that context we do animal research
because we have to there's no other way
around it if tomorrow
uh laws were changed and the FDA said
okay you can do some of this early
experimentation in willing human
participants that would be a very
interesting option I think there would
be a lot of people that would step up
and say yes I'm willing to participate
in early stage clinical research you
already volunteered uh yeah
um and I wouldn't be alone and that you
know is a potential way that animals
could maybe be spared uh being unwilling
participants in this
on that note to whatever extent possible
I think neuralink goes
um
really really far much much farther than
anyone I've ever heard of any
organization I've ever heard of any
anything I've ever seen to give the
animals agency in every aspect of the
research
we have just an incredible team of
people looking out for the animals and
trying to design the experiments such
that they're as purely opt-in as humanly
possible
no animal is ever compelled to
participate in experiments beyond the
surgery itself so if say on a given day
our our star monkey pager doesn't want
to play video games for Smoothie no one
forces them to ever this is a very
important point and I want to cue people
to really what Matt is saying here
um obviously the animals are being
researched on for neural links so they
don't get to opt in to opt out of the
experiment right
um but what he's saying is that they
play these games during which neural
signals are measured from the brain
because they have electrodes implanted
in their brain through a surgery that
thankfully to the brain is painless
right no pain receptors in the brain
um and are playing for reward this is
very different very different than the
typical scenario in Laboratories around
the world where people experiment on
mice monkeys some kisses pigs or other
species in which the typical Arrangement
is to water deprive the animals we never
do that and then have the animals work
for their daily ration of water right
and some people are hearing this and
probably think wow that's barbaric and
here I'm not trying to point fingers at
the people doing that kind of work I
just think it's important that people
understand how the work is done right in
order to motivate an animal
to play a video game right depriving
them of something that they yearn for is
a very efficient way to do that we don't
do that we they have free and full
access to food this entire time so they
aren't hungry they aren't thirsty the
only thing that would motivate them is
if they want a treat extra to their
normal rations
but there's there's never any
deprivation there's never any adverse
negative stimuli that pushes them to do
anything I must say I'm impressed by
that decision
um because uh
training animals to do tasks in
laboratory settings is very hard and the
reason so many researchers have
defaulted to water deprivation and and
having animals work for a ration of
water is because frankly it works right
it allows people to finish their PHD or
their postdoc more quickly than having
to wait around
um and try and figure out why uh their
monkey isn't working that day in fact
having known a number of people who've
done these kinds of experiments although
we've never done them in my lab
my monkey isn't working today is a
common uh gripe among graduate students
and postdocs who do this kind of work
um and for people who work on mice okay
so this is um uh very important
information to get across and there's no
Public Relation statement uh woven into
this is just we're talking about the
nature of the research but I think it is
important that people are aware of this
yeah it's one of the one of the
underappreciated Innovations out of
neurolink is how far the Animal Care
team has been able to to move in the
direction of Humane treatment of these
guys wonderful as an animal lover myself
I can only say wonderful
why pigs yeah pigs are you know they're
actually fairly commonly used in medical
device research
um more you know in the cardiac area
their hearts are you know somewhat
similar to human hearts how big are
these pigs I've seen Little Pigs and
I've seen big pigs yeah there's a range
there's a bunch of different varieties
of pig there's a bunch of different
species that um you know you can
optimize for different uh
characteristics there's mini pigs
there's
um you know Yorkshires there's uh a lot
of different kind of pigs that we use in
different contexts
when we're trying to optimize a certain
characteristic
so yeah the pigs are we don't
necessarily need them to be smart or
task performers although occasionally we
have you know trained them to walk on a
treadmill when we're studying how their
limbs move for some of our spinal cord
research
um but we're not you know recording
interesting say cognitive data out of
their minds they're really just a
biological platform with a skull that's
close enough in size and shape to humans
to be a valid platform to study the
safety of the device
unlike a monkey or a human a pig
I don't think can reach out and hit a
button or a lever exactly how are they
signaling that they um saw or
um sent to something yeah so again the
pigs are really just a safety platform
to say the device is safe to implant it
doesn't you know break down or cause any
kind of toxic reaction the monkeys are
where we are really doing our heavy
lifting in terms of ensuring that we're
getting good signals out of the device
that that what we expect to see in
humans is validated on a functional
level in in monkeys first
let's talk about the skull yeah years
ago you and I were enjoying a
conversation about these very sorts of
things that we're discussing today and
he said you know the skull is actually a
pretty lousy uh biological adaptation
far better would be a titanium plate You
Know spoken like a true neurosurgeon uh
with a radio receiver implanted in his
hand
um but in all seriousness
you know drilling through the skull with
a two millimeter hole certainly don't do
this at Home Folks
um please don't do this but
um that yes that's a small
um entry site but I think most people
cringe when they hear about that or
think about that sure and it obviously
has to be done by a neurosurgeon with
all the appropriate
um uh
environmental conditions in place to
limit infection
what did you mean when you said that the
skull is a poor adaptation in a titanium
plate will be better and in particular
what does that mean in reference to
things like traumatic brain injury I
mean are human beings unnecessarily
vulnerable at the level of traumatic
brain injury because our skulls are just
not
um hard enough
you know maybe I'm being too harsh about
skull the skull is uh very good at what
it does given the tools that we are
working with as biological organisms
that develop in our mother's uterus the
skull is you know usually the
appropriate size it's one of the hardest
things in your body
um that said there are a couple puzzling
vulnerabilities
some of the thinnest bone in the skull
is in the temporal region this is uh you
know neurosurgeons will all know that
I'm heading toward a feature that
sometimes Darkly is called God's Little
joke
where the very thin bone of the of the
temporal
um part of the skull has one of the
largest arteries that goes to the lining
of the brain right attached to the
inside of it and so this this bone just
to the side of your eye tends to
fracture if you're struck there and the
sharp edges of that fractured bone very
often cut an artery called the middle
meningeal artery that leads to a big
blood clot that crushes the brain that's
how a lot of people with you know
otherwise would be a relatively minor
injury end up dying is this large blood
clot developing from high pressure
arterial blood that crushes the the
brain
and so why would you put the artery
right on the inside of the very thin
bone that's most likely to fracture it's
an enduring mystery but this is probably
the most obvious failure mode in in you
know the design of a human skull
otherwise you know in terms of General
impact resistance
I think the brain is a very hard thing
to protect and the the architecture of
human anatomy probably given all other
possible architectures that can arise
from development it's not that bad
really
um
one of the interesting features in terms
of shock absorption that hopefully
prevents a lot of traumatic brain injury
is the fluid sheath around the brain the
the brain you may know is
um it's mostly fat it floats in salt
water in our brains so our brains are
all floating in in salt water and so
with rapid acceleration deceleration
that sheath of salt water adds a
marvelous protective cushion against
development of
you know bruising of the brain say or
bleeding in the brain and so I think for
any flaws in the design that do exist
um
you can imagine things being a lot worse
and there's probably a lot fewer tbis
than would exist if a human designer was
taking a first crack at it
as you describe the the thinness of this
temporal bone and the in the presence of
a critical artery just beneath it
um I'm thinking about most helmets
um and here I also want to cue up the
fact that while whenever we hear about
TBI or CTE or brain injury people always
think football hockey but most traumatic
brain injuries are things like car
accidents or construction work right and
it's not football and hockey for some
reason football and hockey and boxing
get all the attention but my colleagues
that work on traumatic brain injury tell
me that most of the traumatic brain
injury they see is somebody slips at a
party and hits their head or
um uh you know was in a car accident or
environmental environmental accidents of
various kinds
to my mind most helmets don't actually
cover this region close to the eyes so
is there is there also a failure of um
helmet engineering that um you know I
can understand why you'd want to have
your peripheral vision out the sides of
your eyes uh per free of your eyes but
it seems to me if this is such critical
real estate why why isn't it being
better protected
you know I'm no expert in helmets but
um I don't think we see a lot of
epidural hematomas and squirts injuries
to get this kind of injury you usually
need a really focal blunt trauma like
the baseball bat to the head is a
classic mechanism of injury
that would lead to to a temporal bone
fracture an epidural hematoma
um with sports injuries you know you
don't often see that especially in
football with uh you know a a sharp
sharper object coming in contact with
the head it's usually another helmet
right is the the mechanism of injury uh
so I I I can't think off the top of my
head of an instance of this exact injury
type in sports
you spent a lot of time poking around in
brains of humans
um and while I realize this is not your
area of expertise you are somebody who I
am aware you know cares about his health
and the health of your family and I
think generally People's Health
um when you look out on the landscape of
things that people
can do and shouldn't do if their desire
is to keep their brain healthy do any
um any data or any particular practices
come to mind I mean I think we've all
heard the obvious one don't don't get a
head injury right if you do get a head
injury make sure it gets treated and
don't get a second head injury right but
those are sort of duh type
um answers that um I'm able to give so
I'm curious about the answers that um
perhaps I'm not able to give yeah well
you know the obvious ones it's one that
you you talk about a lot
um and I see a lot of the the smoldering
wreckage of humanity you know in the
operating room uh and in the emergency
room for people that come in you know I
work my practices in San Francisco right
next to the tenderloin and so a lot of
people that end up coming in from the
tender line have been drinking just
spectacular amounts of alcohol for a
long time and their brains are uh you
know very often on the scans they look
like small walnuts inside their empty
skull there's so much atrophy that
happens with an alcohol soaked brain
chronically
that I would say that's you know Far and
Away the most common source of brain
damage that many of us just volunteer
for and it's you know when you look at
the morbidity kind of the human harm in
aggregate that's done it's mystifying
that that it's
not something that we are all paranoid
about we're
um people think that I don't drink it
all I'll occasionally have a drink I I
could take it or leave it frankly if all
the alcohol in the plant disappeared I
wouldn't notice but I do occasionally
have a drink maybe one per year or
something like that but I am shocked at
um this current state of affairs around
alcohol consumption and advertising Etc
when I look at the data mainly out of
the UK brain bank which basically shows
that for every drink that one has on a
regular basis
when you go from zero to one drink per
week
there's more brain atrophy thinning of
the gray matter cortex you go from one
to two more thinning you go from two to
three and there's a near linear
relationship between the amount that
people are drinking and the amount of
brain atrophy and to me it's like it's
just sort of obvious from the these
large-scale studies that
um as you point out alcohol atrophy is
the brain yeah it kills neurons right
and I don't have any bias against
alcohol or people that drink I know many
of them but it does seem to me kind of
shocking
um that we're talking about you know the
Resveratrol and red wine which is at you
know infinitesimally small amounts and
not even clear Resveratrol is good for
us anyway by the way
um a matter of debate I should point out
but um so alcohol certainly alcohol and
excess is bad for the brain sure
um in terms of uh okay so we have head
hits bad alcohol bad
um you're working as you mentioned
you're the tenderloin
um is there any awareness that
amphetamine use can can disrupt brain
structure or function you know that
that's not an area that I spent a lot of
time researching in I you know I
incidentally take care of people that
have used every substance known to man
in quantities that are you know
spectacular but I haven't specifically
done research in that area I'm not super
well versed on the literature
yeah I ask in part because
um maybe you know a colleague or will
come across a colleague who's working on
this is there's just such a
um a incredible increase in the use of
things like Adderall Ritalin modafinil
armodafinil which I think in small
amounts in clinical clinically
prescribed situations can be very
beneficial but
um let's be honest many people are using
these on a chronic basis right I don't
think we really know what it does to the
brain aside from increasing addiction
for those substances that's very clear
well For Better or Worse we're
generating a massive data set right now
well put
um
I'd like to briefly go back to our
earlier discussion about neuroplasticity
you made an interesting statement which
is that we are not aware of any single
brain area that one can stimulate in
order to invoke plasticity right it's a
malleability of neural architecture
years ago Mike mirzanek and colleagues
at UCSF did some experiments where they
stimulate nucleus basalis and paired
that stimulation with eight kilohertz
tone or um in some cases they could also
stimulate a different brain area the
ventral tegmental area which causes the
release of dopamine and pair it with a
tone and in it seemed in every one of
these cases they observed
massive plasticity
um now I look at those data and I
compare them to the kind of classic data
um I think it was Carl Ashley that did
these experiments where they would take
animals and they'd scoop out a little
bit of Cortex
put the animal back into a learning
environment and the animal would do
pretty well if not perfectly sure so
they scoop out a different region of
Cortex and a different animal and by the
end of maybe three four years of these
kinds of lesion experiments they
um referred to the equal potential of
the cortex meaning they concluded that
it didn't matter which piece of the
cortex you took out that there was no
one critical area so on the one hand
you've got these experiments that say
you know you don't really need
a lot of the brain right and and every
once in a while a news story will come
out where um they'll a patient a person
will go in for a brain scan for some
other reason or an experiment and the
person seems perfectly normal and
they're like missing half their cortex
right and then on the other hand you
have these experiments like the
stimulation of basalus or VTA where you
get massive plasticity from stimulation
in one area I was I've never been able
to reconcile these kinds of discrepant
findings and so I'd really like just
your opinion on this you know what is it
about the brain as an organ that lets it
be both so critical at the level of
individual neurons in circuits so so
critical and yet at the same time
um it's able to uh circumvent these what
would otherwise seem like massive
lesions and holes in itself yeah I mean
a lot of a lot of it to reconcile those
experiments you first account for the
fact that they're probably in different
species right you take out a particular
portion of a pig or a rabbit grain a
small amount you might not see a
difference but a small portion of a
human brain say the part most interested
in coordinating speech or finger
movement and you're going to see
profound losses or visual cortex right
I take out a small portion of V1 and
you'll you'll have a visual deficit
um and so species matters uh age matters
if you take out half of the brain in a
very young baby
that baby has a reasonable chance of
developing High a high degree of
function by having the remaining half
subsume some of the functions lost on
the other side
because they're very very young and
their brain is still developing it's a
it's to some degree a blank slate with
extremely high plasticity over many
years so that can overcome a lot of
deficits
um
taking an adult
animal's brain that isn't very well
differentiated functionally to begin
with you might not see those deficits so
apparently there's a lot of redundancy
as well right there's a lot of say
cerebellar and spinal circuits in other
animals that
generate stereotyped Behavior patterns
and might not need the brain at all to
perform say a walking movement or some
other sequences of motor activities so a
lot of that depends on the experimental
setup I would say in general adult
humans are very vulnerable to losing
small parts of their brains and losing
discrete functions
I'm going to take the liberty of asking
a question that merges across neural
Link in Tesla
I could imagine that
cars whether or not they're on autopilot
mode or being driven by the human
directly
um and Society generally would benefit
from knowing whether or not a human is
very alert or sleepy sure
I don't own a Tesla um
perhaps this technology already exists
but is there any idea that a simple
sensor maybe even a just eyelid position
or pupil size or head position
could be introduced to
a car like the Tesla or another car for
that matter yeah and resolve a common
problem which is that when people are
less alert not just when people fall
asleep but the simple drop in alertness
that occurs when people are sleepy is my
read of the data is responsible for
approximately a third a third it's
incredible of accidents between vehicles
and then of course some percentage of
those are going to be lethal accidents
so in terms of preserving life this
might seem like a minor case but it's
actually a major case scenario yeah you
know I have no you know special insight
into how Tesla software works I know
they have brilliant engineers
um
when I have a Tesla when I drive it it
seems to know when I'm looking at the
road versus not and it yells at me if
I'm not looking at the roads how does it
do that and what voice does it use
there's a small camera uh up by the
rearview mirror and I think it's a
simple eye track my my guess here is
that it's a simple eye tracking program
um and so it may already be the case
that it's implemented that it's
detecting whether your eyes are open or
not obviously you know it's not
um strict it's not stringent because
sunglasses
um and I've I've seen Forums on the
internet where people tape over that
small camera so like so they can wall oh
goodness but uh you know I think they're
definitely making efforts to try to try
to save lives here
incredible I say incredible just because
I think I'm fortunate enough to live in
a lifetime where there were no electric
cars when I was growing up and now
things are moving oh so fast
um no pun intended
what is your wish for brain machine
interface and brain augmentation so
let's let's assume that the the clinical
stuff can be worked out or maybe you
have a a pet clinical condition that you
just are um just yearning to see
resolved yeah that would be fine too but
in addition to that way you really just
expand out let's say we can
extend your life 200 years or we're
thinking about the kind of world that
your children are going to live in and
their grandchildren will live in what do
you think is really possible yeah with
brain augmentation and brain machine
interface and here please feel no bias
whatsoever to answer in a way that
reveals to us your
um your incredible empathy and
consideration of clinical conditions
because that's how you spend your days
is fixing patients uh and helping their
lives be better so if it lands in that
category great but
um for sake of of fun and forsake of
delight and forsake of um really getting
us the audience to to understand what's
really possible here please feel no
shackles yeah uh well you know I I
love the idea down the road and we're
talking you know a 10-year maybe 20-year
time frame of uh humans just getting
control over some of the horrible ways
that their brains go wrong right so
I think everybody
at this point has either known someone
or second order known someone a friend
of a friend who has been touched by
addiction or depression suicide
obesity these functions of the brain or
malfunctions of the brain are what
drives me these are the things that I
want to tackle in my career you know in
terms of my kids lifetime I'm thinking
you know full human expansion of human
cognition into AI full immersion in the
internet of your cognitive abilities
having no limitation for what you think
um as bottlenecked by needing to read
the Wikipedia article first to have the
data to inform your thoughts
having communication with anyone that
you want to unrestricted by this you
know flapping air past meat on your face
it's a
you know a means of communication that's
ridiculously prone to being
misunderstood it's also a tiny narrow
bottleneck of communication where you
know trying to send messages back and
forth through a tiny straw and there's
no reason that needs to necessarily be
true it's the way things have always
been but it isn't the way things are
going to be in the future
uh and I think there's a
you know
a million
very sci-fi possibilities in terms of
banding human Minds together to be even
more potent as a as a multi-unit uh
organism uh you know as an opt-in
multi-brain
uh you know these are things that are so
far down the road I can't even directly
see how they would be implemented but
the technology we're working on is a
little crack in the door that allows
some of this stuff to even be thought
about in a realistic way
well to that to that point I you know
encourage anyone who is you know excited
about things like that you know
especially mechanical engineers software
Engineers robotics engineers come to the
neuralink website and look at the jobs
we've got we need the brightest people
on the planet working on these the
hardest problems uh in the world in my
opinion and so if you want to work on
this stuff come help us
I have several responses and to what you
just said
um first off I'll get the the least
important one out of the way which is
that years ago I applied for a job at
neurolink the neural link website at
that time was incredibly sparse right it
was just said neural link and I said if
you're interested give us your email so
I put my email there I got no response
so
um the uh they made a wise choice in um
now uh fast forward several years I am
um very grateful and I think very lucky
um that you who passed through
fortunately for me through my lab at one
point and we had some fun Expeditions
together in the wild uh neural
exploration so we can talk about some
other time as well as I'm learning from
you as you pass through your time at
Stanford
um but have arrived there at neurolink
and and I'll say that they're very lucky
to have you and um folks like Dan Adams
who have known for your very long time
so uh phenomenal neurosurgeons like
yourself neuroscientists and
um Vision scientists like Dan and others
it's really an incredible Mission so I
really want to start off by saying um
thank you to you and all your colleagues
there I know that neurolink is really
tip of the spear in being public facing
with the kinds of things they're doing
and and being so forthcoming about how
that work is done in animals and exactly
what they're doing
um and that's a very brave stance to
take yeah especially given the nature of
the work but well that's classic Elon
right he he doesn't keep secrets in
public too commonly he tells you what
he's going to do and then he does it and
people are always amazed by that you
know he releases the Tesla master plan
and tells you exactly what the company
intends to do for the next several years
and people assume that there's some
subterfuge that he is misdirecting but
it's it's right out there in the open
and I think neuraling follows in that
path of you know we want people to know
what we're doing we want the brightest
people in the world to come help us we
we want to be able to help patients we
want
you know the most motivated patients
with quadriplegia to you know visit our
patient registry uh and and sign up to
be considered for clinical trials that
that will happen in the future we'll put
a link to that by the way so um maybe
just uh the direct call could happen now
so you uh this is for people who are
quadriplegic or who know people who are
quadriplegic who are interested in being
part of this clinical trial it's a
patient registry right now that we're
just collecting information to see who
might be eligible for clinical trials
that'll happen in the future we're still
working with the FDA to hammer out the
details and and get their final
permission uh to proceed with the trial
great so please see the note in the show
note the link excuse me in the in the
show note captions for that yeah I want
to thank you guys for your stance uh
being public facing and also doing the
incredibly hard work I also think the
robotics aspect which you've clarified
for me uh today is extremely Forward
Thinking and uh absolutely critical so a
lot of critical engineering that note
out will Wick out into other domains of
neurosurgery and medical technology not
just serving neural links Mission
directly and I really want to thank you
uh first of all for coming here today
and taking time out of your important
schedule of seeing patients and doing
brain surgery literally time away from
your family and time away from your
mission at neurolink briefly to uh to
share with people what you guys are
doing as I mentioned before there's a
lot of Mystique around it and even
despite the fact that neurolink has gone
out of their way to try and erase some
of that Mystique this to me is the
clearest picture ever to my knowledge
that has been given about what's going
on there and and the the stated and the
real Mission and what's going on at the
level of of nuts and bolts and and guts
and brains and this kind of thing and I
really just want to thank you also for
for being you which is uh perhaps sounds
like a a kind of an odd um thing to hear
but
I think as made apparent by the device
implanted in your hand you don't just
um do this for a job you live and
breathe and embody truly embody this
stuff around the nervous system and
trying to figure out how to fix it how
to make it better and you live and
breathe it and I know your deep love for
it so I want to thank you for um not
just the brains that you put into it and
the energy you put into it but also for
the the heart that you put into it
thanks for that Andrew I appreciate that
we we just want to help people we want
to make things better well
I know that to be true knowing you and
um thank you again for coming here today
and I look forward to another round of
discussion and um whenever the time
happens to be when these incredible
technologies have um spelled out to the
next uh major Milestone thank you thank
you for joining me for today's
discussion with Dr Matthew McDougall all
about the human brain and how it
functions how it breaks down and the
incredible efforts that are being
carried out at neurolink in order to
overcome diseases of brain and nervous
system function and to augment how the
human brain works if you'd like to learn
more about Dr mcdougall's work and the
specific work being done at neurolink
please see the links that we've provided
in the show note captions if you're
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