In the shadow of SpaceX and Tesla, Neuralink is Elon Musk’s best-known company. badly? A look at the company’s history and plans.

Paypal, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company: the list of companies founded by Elon Musk is long. and incomplete. Because with Neuralink, a multimillion-dollar company is missing that does not attract attention with regular headlines. As usual. Because at the end of last year it was said: “Neuralink wants to use computer interfaces in the human brain in 2022”.

It sounds spectacular. But is it? According to Neuralink, the interface in the human brain should take on several tasks. For one thing, it could measure and assess brain activity. On the other hand, technology must stimulate certain areas. Musk once said the interface is like a “Fitbit in your brain”. An activity tracker in the brain.

Pig with electrodes on the brain

The history of the tracker begins in 2016, when Neuralink was founded. But it wasn’t until four years later that the company showed what it was developing and what the technology could do. At the time, Musk used a pig at the Neuralink site in California to show how signals from the brain were transmitted to a computer. Every time the animal touched something with its trunk, electrical signals could be seen on a screen.

And Musk revealed something else at the time: To implant the interface into a brain, Neuralink helped develop the right robot. The machine is intended to connect the fine lines of the minicomputer to human tissue. Almost nothing would be seen of the operation later, Musk said. Only a small scar would remain under the hair.

A monkey playing pong

The next hit then a year later. Neuralink showed a monkey using the brain probe to play the video game Pong. One video showed the male macaque learning to use a joystick to control a point on a monitor in a multi-step process. A background screen showed signs of Neuralink implants that had been placed in the animal’s brain six weeks earlier.

This year, Neuralink wants to test its interface in humans. The goal: The technology should allow paraplegic patients, for example, to operate devices with brain signals. For example, they might use chat programs to communicate with friends or shop online.

Musk once said that one day it might even be conceivable to use the technology to stitch together damaged nerve tissue so that people could walk again, for example. Possible areas of application for the brain probe were also the treatment of pain, visual disturbances, hearing loss or insomnia, it was said at the time.

critics are not lacking

The plans sound promising and ambitious. However, there are critics. The public performances of the company are a great theater, criticized, for example, the IT-Store “Tech Review 2020Neuralink isn’t the first company to believe that brain implants could augment or restore human abilities. In the 1990s, scientists planted probes in the brains of paralyzed people to show that the signals could move robotic arms or computer cursors.

And professor of neural interfaces at the Science Media Center in the UK. is quoted by the BBC: Neuralink’s technology isn’t particularly impressive, even if the electronics for wireless data transmission are state-of-the-art. But implantation by a robot is impressive.

Considering the achievements of Tesla and SpaceX in breaking new ground in electric vehicles and space, Neuralink rightly seems like the lesser-known company. That could change when the company presents its first successes in inserting its chip into the human brain. Maybe already this year.