The startups bringing brain-computer interfaces to market
11:17 Share

Recruitment. For many, it can be cold, functional, or lacking that personal touch. But LHH believes it should be more. By connecting people to opportunity, not just skills to roles, beautiful things happen at work. A leader inspires. A team grows. The people you hire develop into the people you admire, making 90,000 hours of work in a lifetime time well spent.

Recruitment, development, career transition. LHH, a beautiful working world. Discover recruitment solutions at LHH.com slash beautiful.

On our show, we'll pull back the curtain and give you the type of honest, unfiltered advice we usually reserve for top executives. Maybe you have a coworker with boundary issues, or you want to know how to inspire and motivate your team. No problem is too big or too small. Give us a call and we'll help you solve the problems you're stuck on. Find Fixable wherever you listen to podcasts. ♪

The new tech race to get inside the human brain without getting too far inside the human brain. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Brain computer interfaces, or BCIs, have made real gains in recent years. This technology has enabled people with paralysis to move prosthetic limbs or type out communication using computer implants in their brains. Now, some neurotech startups are hoping to bring their implants to a larger market by making them less invasive. But they're not sure if they're going to be able to do that.

Several have received FDA approval to start clinical trials in people, according to Christopher Mims, a tech journalist at The Wall Street Journal who recently wrote about the BCI landscape. So Elon Musk made the current generation of brain-computer interfaces famous or infamous, depending on how you look at it.

through his company Neuralink. And they are in very early trials. And what characterizes Neuralink is they are the most invasive of the brain computer interface companies. So they're going to put electrodes the deepest into your brain, which by the way, is not super deep. It's like seven millimeters into your cortex. But still, this is brain surgery we're talking about here.

Then there are other companies that are a little less invasive. There's one called Paradromix, and they have a little tiny electrode, a bunch of tiny needles sticking out of it. It looks like a patch of Velcro maybe. And that just kind of sticks on top of your cortex, which is on the top of your brain, and penetrates a little way into your brain. And then there's companies like Precision Neuroscience, and they claim that their implant is not invasive at all. It just sits there.

between your skull and the top of your brain, and is reading all of the activity from your cortex that way. What's kind of the technical challenge with, obviously, it seems more optimal, you know, kind of the less invasive this tech can be, but what are the trade-offs? The big challenge with getting signal out of your brain is that the more signal you want to get out, generally the more invasive an implant has to be.

And the more invasive it is, the more neurons are potentially damaged in the process of installing it in your head. So there's kind of this big debate happening now where some companies say, we're going to put something less invasive into your head. And it's so non-invasive that someday if you want to upgrade it, you could have it taken out and put a new one in. But others say, well, that's not really going to get you the kind of

deep connection with a computer that you might want to, for example, just think a thought and then have those words appear on your screen. Or let's say you were paralyzed and you wanted to drive a car just by thinking about it, that sort of thing. Right. One of the companies that you write about that is on the less invasive side is working with Apple. How does this technology work?

So there's a company called Synchron, and their whole idea is rather than trepanating your head, so literally drilling a hole in your skull, they want to run a little wire up through one of the blood vessels in your neck and up into your brain. And then they put electrodes in one of those major blood vessels that runs between the two halves of your brain.

And it's like a stent, which is like a little, well, it looks like a Chinese finger trap or something, but it goes on the inside of your blood vessel. And that stent has a bunch of electrodes in it. And then the idea is that it can receive signals from all over the brain, but it's sort of listening to them from afar. And this technology, Apple has announced they're going to officially release

Partner with this company called Synchron. And what it is, is you have the brain implant and you're also wearing the Apple Vision Pro. You can use a computer because you use your eyes to point at things inside of Apple's headset. And then you sort of think of maybe like a major limb movement or something like waving your arm. And that constitutes the click on that object that you're looking at.

So it's a less invasive type of brain implant, but it's also less precise. You can't think about moving a cursor to a particular point. You can only think of clicking. We'll be right back.

Hi, I'm Frances Fry. And I'm Anne Morris. And we are the hosts of a new TED podcast called Fixable. We've helped leaders at some of the world's most competitive companies solve all kinds of problems. On our show, we'll pull back the curtain and give you the type of honest, unfiltered advice we usually reserve for top executives. Maybe you have a co-worker with boundary issues. Maybe you have a co-worker with boundary issues.

or you want to know how to inspire and motivate your team, no problem is too big or too small. Give us a call and we'll help you solve the problems you're stuck on. Find Fixable wherever you listen to podcasts. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Christopher Mims, tech journalist at The Wall Street Journal.

So it certainly sounds like there are a lot of companies, startups in this space that I can only imagine is kind of a high risk, high capital endeavor. What does the investment landscape look like right now? So a number of these companies are getting, you know, tens of millions in early investment investments.

But it seems like it's going to take hundreds of millions for these to really come to market. And that's a big challenge because right now, of course, the brain-computer interface market is tiny, right? Less than 100 people have ever had them in history. For these companies to scale up, they're really aiming to become something that, let's say you had advanced arthritis, right? And you'd lost some

function in a limb, maybe in the future you would get one of these brain computer interfaces and it would help you operate things in your home or even operate a prosthetic limb. And by doing this, they're hoping to expand the market from, you know, just a few tens of thousands of people potentially to many millions of people to eventually make this a mainstream medical device that people wouldn't hesitate to get. The analogy that one expert gave me was,

cochlear implants, right, used to be a really exotic thing. And now, you know, people considering hearing aids will often get a cochlear implant. And if you think about it, a cochlear implant, which is a, you know, a thing that goes in your, deep in your ear and interfaces directly with the nerves that go to your brain so you can hear, that cochlear implant is a form of neural prosthesis. You know, it's not quite a brain-computer interface, but it's pretty close.

So what kinds of ethical or regulatory issues come up with this kind of technology?

These devices are very much medical devices still. So they're regulated by the FDA for testing purposes. Some of them have been fast tracked because, you know, if somebody is completely locked in by, you know, so-called Lou Gehrig's disease or paralysis or some other neurodegenerative disorder, there's a lot of folks who really want these because it can make a big difference in their quality of life. So the FDA, you know, for humanity,

humanitarian and other reasons has allowed these companies to start experimenting on a trial basis. But, you know, as they come to market, there are going to be the same challenges that come with any other type of invasive prosthetic, right? You know, one neurosurgeon told me, look, you know, it's surgery. There's a risk of infection. There's always the risks that are associated with anesthesia. You know, there's a risk that over time,

the brain computer interface will detach from the neurons in your head and then it won't work as well, depending on its design. From an ethical point of view, I think that, you know, one issue is that there have been neural prostheses in the past, for instance, like kind of bionic eyes and stuff where the companies that created them have gone out of business. So there's always the issue of like, you know, you get something installed in your head and

the company messes up the software update to the portion that like sits in your chest and is connected by wires and they brick it like you would brick a phone. That's going to be a problem, right? Or the company goes out of business and then who's supporting your brain computer interface? Right. You have like the equivalent of a floppy disk inside your brain. That's right. Yeah. You get an early one of these and it's like, it's like you have the equivalent of like a three and a half inch floppy disk drive in your head and everybody else is on to like, you know,

flash drives or wireless or whatever. So what are the big technological challenges that these companies are trying to solve for?

Probably the biggest technological challenge right now is they need a lot more of these in people's heads so they can get a lot more data and they can really see what the limit is of each of these different types of technology in terms of basically how much bandwidth they can get by connecting to the brain. So, you know, some of them are making claims that they're less invasive brain computer interfaces, right?

can do the things that people would actually want, you know, controlling a computer, synthesizing speech. But some of them have yet to demonstrate that because these things just haven't been sitting in people's heads for long enough. And once they have been in people's brains for a long time, then there's this kind of co-evolution where

The AI that's processing the signals from the brain gets trained on more and more neural data. So the system can become more capable. But at the same time, the human is training themselves or is being trained by the company. It's a form of biofeedback. And the human can learn to, I guess, quote unquote, drive a brain computer interface with greater and greater facility over time. That was Christopher Mims at The Wall Street Journal.

We'll link to Christopher's full article at our website, MarketplaceTech.org. And like he mentioned, there is quite a bit of money flowing into this space. In fact, last week, Elon Musk's Neuralink reportedly raised another 600 million dollars, bringing its total valuation to nine billion dollars.

And there's also a unique competitor in this space. Gabe Newell, co-founder and CEO of the video game company Valve, also has his own brain-computer interface startup called Starfish Neuroscience. The company says it plans to produce a custom electrophysiology chip that can essentially read your mind and stimulate parts of the brain later this year.

And speaking of video games, our own Daniel Shin, who produced this episode, tested out a brain-computer interface for a story a few years ago. Don't worry, it was completely non-invasive, just a cap with electrodes that weakly detect brain activity, but enough to play a video game with his mind. We've got a video if you want to check it out. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.

Hi, I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director, and I'm excited to be joining the hosts of our flagship podcast, Uncanny Valley.

It's a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. It's hosted by some amazing Wired writers and editors, where each week they discuss the influence of technology and culture from the Valley on our everyday lives. But we're also adding another episode to that feed, hosted by me. Each week, I'll have an urgent conversation with one of our extremely busy Wired reporters or editors about this week in news. ♪

Our journalists are constantly asking smart questions to find out where they lead and to help you understand where the world is going a little bit better. I hope this new weekly episode does just that. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.