From helping people with paralysis type to winning every pub quiz you play, will brain chips usher in a new technological revolution?
As Professor Luke O’Neill explains, first there was the agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution.
“If we fast forward 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, who knows where technology will go?” he told Show Me the Science.
“The AI part of it is going to be really important.”
Developing brain chips
While he has recently been best known for buying Twitter and rebranding it as X, Elon Musk is among the people hoping to take the next steps of the technological revolution.
Last week, he announced his company Neuralink had successfully implanted a chip into a human patient’s brain and that patient “is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking”.
While Mr Musk has been criticised for his lack of transparency surrounding Neuralink’s technological developments – including not sharing any proof of the implant yet - his supposed achievement has reignited conversations about the potential uses of brain chip implants.
Prof O’Neill said a successful chip implant would be able to detect the neural activity of the brain and send those signals to a computer.
Treating disabilities
The aim of Mr Musk, for example, is to have the chip read thoughts in the brain and have a computer type out those thoughts.
“There's all kinds of applications if this works,” Prof O’Neill said.
“Musk said initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.
“For things like quadriplegia and paralysis, if you come up with a way for a chip in the brain to sense the desire to move, that can be connected by a computer to either a prosthetic limb or maybe to muscles.”
The use of brain chips for disabilities has already happened last May thanks to Swiss scientists.
A man who was paralysed from the hips downward for 12 years received an implant that created a “digital bridge” between the brain and the spinal cord.
“When he was thinking ‘I want to stand up’, that was interpreted by the chip... and he was able to stand up [and] walk to some extent,” Prof O’Neill explained.
Brain computers
Prof O’Neill also suggested brain chips could be used to let people search for things online without even going near a computer.
“Imagine if you can read your thoughts on this chip, send them as a WiFi signal to a computer and ask a question,” he said.
“If you can now just think and get answers to a computer sent back to your brain, it's the end of pub quizzes.
“It's the end of exams because all the information can be accessed in that way... That's where this might go.”
But what are the costs involved in creating such technology? What are the risks? Listen back to the full episode of Show Me the Science to find out more.
