How Neuralink Will Solve Blindness

Neura Pod (All Things Neuralink)

00:16 Elon on helping quadriplegics and the blind

01:29 Neuralink background

02:52 James Douma explains how this works

04:34 Can Neuralink actually do this?

05:07 Neuralink will learn a lot

07:14 How we see

09:27 Improvements will occur rapidly

13:14 The brain is flexible

Zuby x Elon Interview: https://youtu.be/pjc_oo4ApSY

Think a tiny chip could be the answer to blindness? Sounds like sci-fi, right? Well, you might want to think again.

Here’s a clip of Elon sharing the first two problems his company Neuralink is focused on solving.

Around 40 million people around the world have some form of blindness. This number continues to grow, but fortunately this problem may become an issue of the past.

If you’ve been subscribed to Neura Pod, and already understand the basics of how Neuralink will work, go ahead and skip the next 60 seconds of the video.

So far, Neuralink has demonstrated they’ve successfully been able to implant this quarter-sized package in monkeys and other animals, and now that it’s time to test in humans, you’re probably wondering how this tiny package will be able to provide vision to those who don’t currently have it. Neuralink is working on building a brain-machine interface, or device that will help us send information from our brains to our computers and vice versa.

The surgery will require cutting open a hole in the skull, and having a surgical robot sew these very tiny threads into the brain. The threads have probes that can detect electrical impulses from the neurons and then send this information back to the chips.

Since there are many problems Neuralink hopes to solve in the future, like depression, blindness, or paralysis, they have to identify the best areas of the brain to implant these chips. In the case of paralysis for example, they’ll implant in both the motor cortex and the spinal cord. In the case of solving blindness, they’ll implant in the visual cortex in the back of the brain.

I had the chance to interview James Douma and ask him for more detail on how they’ll be able to achieve this.

Thanks for watching. My name is Ryan Tanaka. If you’re interested in hearing more from James about how Neuralink works, check out this video.