5 Neuroscience Experts Weigh in on Elon Musk's Mysterious "Neural Lace" Company

Elon Musk has a reputation as the world’s greatest doer. He can propose crazy ambitious technological projects—like reusable rockets for Mars exploration and hyperloop tunnels for transcontinental rapid transit—and people just assume he’ll pull it off. 

So his latest venture, a new company called Neuralink that will reportedly build brain implants both for medical use and to give healthy people superpowers, has gotten the public excited about a coming era of consumer-friendly neurotech.

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Transcranial alternating current stimulation used to boost working memory

Researchers at Imperial College London found that applying transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) through the scalp helped to synchronize brain waves in different areas of the brain, enabling subjects to perform better on tasks involving short-term working memory.

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Paralyzed man drinks beer using his imagination

A man who is paralyzed from the neck down was able to drink from a bottle of beer by using his imagination. Erik Sorto, 34, has been paralyzed for the last 13 years, but was able to use a robotic arm controlled by his thoughts recently via two silicon chips in his brain, which were able to determine what his intentions were and then send those commands to a prosthetic arm on a table nearby.

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Flying a jet via mind control

Jan Scheuermann, a quadriplegic and pioneering patient for an experimental Pentagon robotics program, continues to break ground in freeing the mind from the body. The 55-year-old mother of two in 2012 agreed to let surgeons implant electrodes on her brain to control a robotic arm. More recently, she flew an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter simulator using nothing but her thoughts, an official said.

 

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Stroke Detecting Headset prototype from Samsung

Samsung’s Early Detection Sensor & Algorithm Package (EDSAP), developed by  Se-hoon Lim, is meant to detect early signs of stroke. A multiple sensor headset records electrical impulses in the brain, algorithms determine the likelihood of a stroke in one minute, and results are presented in a mobile app.  EDSAP can also analyze stress and sleep patterns, and potentially be used to monitor heart activity.  The company believes that the system can one day be built into one’s own glasses.

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Flexctrl brain, a new 32-channel BCI headset aims to speed up the development of brain technology

If you support only one BCI crowdfunding campaign this month, make it this one. Flexctrl brain is a stylish 32-channel brain-computer interface (BCI) packed with the latest technology, and will be developed by corwdfunding campaing on Indiegogo.

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Artificial Retina

Physicists developed an interface to the optical nerve using graphene for an optical prostheses.

Graphene is viewed as a kind of "miracle solution": It is thin, transparent and has a tensile strength greater than that of steel. In addition, it conducts electricity better than copper. Since it comprises only a single layer of carbon atoms it is considered two-dimensional.

 In 2010 the scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for their ground-breaking work on this material.

In October 2013, the "Graphene" project was selected alongside the "Human Brain Project" as a Flagship Project of the EU FET Initiative (Future and Emerging Technologies).

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Brain controlled car steers, accelerates, brakes

AutoNOMOS and the Freie Universität Berlin  are developing BrainDriver, the first car that steers, accelerates, and brakes based on its driver’s thoughts. In a recent experiment, Henrik Matzke drove a car at speeds up to 31 mph.

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First Tests of Thought-Controlled Aircraft Successful

Pilots of the future could be able to control their aircraft by merely thinking commands. Scientists of the Technische Universität München and the TU Berlin have now demonstrated the feasibility of flying via brain control – with astonishing accuracy.
(Photo : Courtesy A. Heddergott/TU München ) 

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Mapping brain activity with molecular precision

A new technique allows neuroscientists to precisely track neural communication in the brain over time, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) along with a specialized molecular MRI contrast agent.

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Neural prosthesis restores normal behavior after brain injury

A new study published in PNAS this month reported used of Brain Machine Interface to successfully restore behavior, in this case, the ability to reach through a narrow opening and grasp food, in a brain-injured rat. Ultimately, the team hopes to develop a device that rapidly and substantially improves function after brain injury in humans.

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Mind-controlled robots in manufacturing, medicine

University at Buffalo researchers are developing brain-computer interface (BCI) devices to mentally control robots. “The technology has practical applications that we’re only beginning to explore,” said Thenkurussi “Kesh” Kesavadas, PhD, UB professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of UB’s Virtual Reality Laboratory. “For example, it could help paraplegic patients to control assistive devices, or it could help factory workers perform advanced manufacturing tasks.”

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Does your brain see things you don’t?

A new study indicates that our brains perceive objects in everyday life that we may not be consciously aware of.

Study participants’ brainwaves captured using EEG indicated that even if a person never consciously recognized the shapes on the outside of the image, their brains still processed those shapes to the level of understanding their meaning.

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A Brain-Machine Interface for Control of Medically-Induced Comma

Researchers have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that monitors a patient’s brain activity with EEG and adjusts the anesthetic infusion rate to precisely control the level of brain activation in a medically induced coma or for general anesthesia, according to a study published online in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

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First human brain-to-brain interface

The telepathic cyborg lives, sort of. University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco claim that they are the first to demonstrate human brain-to-brain communication. Rao sent a signal into a Stocco's brain via the Internet that caused him to move his right hand. Brain-to-brain communication has previously been demonstrated between rats and from humans to rats.
"The experiment is a proof in concept. We have tech to reverse engineer the brain signal and transmit it from one brain to another via computer," said Chantel Prat, an assistant professor of psychology who worked on the project.

The schematic diagram shows how the brainwave signal was transferred from one brain to another.

(Credit: University of Washington)

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Chips that mimic the brain

Novel microchips imitate the brain’s information processing in real time. Neuroinformatics researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich together with colleagues from the EU and US demonstrate how complex cognitive abilities can be incorporated into electronic systems made with so-called neuromorphic chips: They show how to assemble and configure these electronic systems to function in a way similar to an actual brain.

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The future of gaming - using neurophysiological signals

Gaming as a hobby evokes images of lethargic teenagers huddled over their controllers, submerged in their couch surrounded by candy bar wrappers. This image should soon hit the reset button since a more exciting version of gaming is coming. It's called neurogaming, and it's riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other

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Dust sized brain implants

In a potential neuroscience breakthrough, University of California Berkeley scientists have proposed a system that allows for thousands of ultra-tiny “neural dust” chips to be inserted into the brain to monitor neural signals at high resolution and communicate data highly efficiently via ultrasound.

The neural dust design promises to overcome a serious limitation of current invasive brain-machine interfaces (BMI): the lack of an implantable neural interface system that remains viable for
a lifetime. Current BMI systems are also limited to several hundred implantable recording sites, they generate tissue responses around the implanted electrodes  that degrade recording performance over time, and are limited to months to a few years.

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Cognitive enhancement with electrical current

A new study suggests that a gentle, painless electrical current applied to the brain can boost math performance for up to 6 months. Researchers don't fully understand how it works, however, and there could be side effects.

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Samsung tests Brain Computer Interfacing

Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world, MIT Technology Review reports. In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.In their demonstration, the researchers found that people could launch an application and make selections within it by concentrating on an icon that was blinking at a distinctive frequency.

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