Elon Musk’s relatively lesser-known startup — Brain-Computer Interface
#Technology
Humans starting interacting with computers (machines) using a mouse. Then we had a touchscreen — you interact with your hands. Now, the technology to interact with machines has evolved to the extent we can control devices like smart phones & Google homes using voice. We also have the gesture control — move your hand about in the air & play tennis on your X-box. But the final frontier, or challenge, is to interact with devices using just our brains! No hand movements or voice or anything, just using your thoughts.
In essence, a brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system that enables us to direct an external device to do a task — move the cursor or start a motor — by only using signals from our brains! This works partly because our brain is also an electric machine. When we ‘think’ that we need to move our arm, neurons in our brain produce tiny electric currents that travel along our body to the respective muscles, which then contract to perform the hand movement. This is a very very crude explanation. I will explain in detail later in one of my posts about ‘how our brain tells our body to move’.
So if we can interpret the electric signals from the brain & then translate these signals through computer chips into actions that the brain wants done, we effectively create a brain-computer interface. We are making rapid progress in this almost science-fiction technology. Many recent experiments have successfully demonstrated the control of prosthetic limbs by people using just their thoughts. One of the emerging startups working towards making BCI a reality is Neuralink — co-founded by a not-so-well-known bloke called Elon Musk.
