Dr. Matthew MacDougall: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine today. My guest is doctor mathews c.

google. Doctor mathews c. Google is the head neurosurgeon at neural link. Neural link is a company whose goal is to develop technologies to overcome specific clinical chAllenges of the brain and nervous system, as well as to improve upon brain design, that is, to improve the way that brains currently function by augmenting memory, by augmenting cognition and by improving communication between humans and between machines and humans.

These are all, of course, tremendous goals, and neural link is uniquely poised to accomplish these goals because they are approaching these chAllenges by combining both existing knowledge of brain function from the fields of neuroscience and neurosurgery with robotics, machine learning, computer science and the development of novel devices in order to change the ways that human brains work for the Better. Today's conversation with docker, Matthew google, is a truly special one, because I and many others in science and medicine consider neurosurgeons the air stronger ts of neutral science in the brain, that is, they go where others have simply not gone before, and are in a position to discover incredibly novel things about how the human brain works. Because they are literally in there pRobing and cutting, stimulating at setting up, and able to monitor how people's cognition, an and behavior and speech changes as the brain itself has changed structurally and functionally.

Today's discussion with document google will teach you how the brain works through the lens of a neurosurgeon. IT will also teach you about neural specific perspective about which chAllenge is a brain function and disease are immediately tractable which ones they are working on. Now that is, as well as where they see the future of augmenting brain function for sake of treating disease and for simply making brains work Better.

Today's discussion also gets into the realm of devising the peifer al nervous system. In fact, one thing that you'll learn is that doctor c. Google has a radio receiver implanted in the purpura of his own body.

He did this not to overcome any specific clinical chAllenge, but to overcome a number of daily, everyday life chAllenges, and in some ways, to demonstrate the powerful utility of combining novels, machines, novel devices with what we call our nervous system and different objects and technologies within the world. I know that might sound a little bit mysterious, but you'll soon learn exactly what i'm referring to. And by the way, he also implanted his family members with similar devices.

So well, all of this might sound a little bit like science fiction. This is truly science reality. These experiments, both the implantation of specific devices and the attempt, overcome specific movement disorders such as parkinson's and other disorders of deep brain function, as well as augment the human brain and make IT work far Better than IT ever has in the course of human evolution.

Our experiments and things that are happening now at neural link, doctor mic google, also generously takes us under the hood, so to speak, of what's happening at neural link, explaining exactly the sort of experiments that they are doing and have planned how they are approaching those experiments. We get into an extensive conversation about the utility of animal versus human research in improving brain function and in devising and improving the human brain and in overcoming disease in terms of neurosurgery and neurology. Ks, goals by the end of today's episode, you will have a much clear understanding of how human brains work and how they can be improved by robotics and engineering.

And you'll have a very clear picture of what neural link is doing toward these goals. Doctor, my google did his medical training at the university of california san ago and at stanford university school of medicine, and of course, is now at neural lake. So he is in a unique stance to teach us about human brain function and this function, and to explain to us what the past, present and future of brain augmentation is really all about.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Now, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electoral light concentrations, or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits.

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Again, that drink element element t dot com slash huberman. Today's episode also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga ea cessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different duration.

And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states. And that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try. And I too founded to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have a longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions, those you don't know. Yoga eza is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations.

And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial again, that's waking up that com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor mathews, c. Ogle, dr. Oogly, welcome.

Good to be here. Nice to see under.

great to see you again, will get into our history a little bit later. But just to kick things off as a neurosurgeon and as a neuroscientist, could you share with us your vision of the brain as an organ, as IT relates to what's possible there? And I think most everyone understands that the brain is, along with the body, the seat of our cognition, feelings, our ability to move IT and that damage they are, can limit our ability to feel the way we want to feel or move the way we want to move.

But surgeons tend of you, the world a little bit differently the most, because, as the not so funny joke goes, you know, they like to cut and they like to fix and they like to mend, and they, in your case, have the potential to add things into the brain that don't exist. They're already. So how do you think about and conceptualized the brain as an organ? And what do you think is really possible with the brain that most of us don't already probably think about?

Yeah, it's great question. Thinking about the brain as this three pound lump of meat trapped in a prison of the skull, IT seems almost magical that I could create up, you know, human, a human set of behaviors and life um merely from electrical impulses.

When you start to see patients and see, say, a small tumor eating away at a little part of the brain and see A A very discrete function of that brain, go down in isolation, you start to realize that the brain really is a collection of functional modules pinned together, duck tape together um in this in this bone box attached to your head um and sometimes you see very interesting failure modes. So one of the most memorable patients I ve ever had was very early on in my training. I was down at uc.

Sandy ago and saw a very Young guy who had just been in a car accident. We had Operated on him. And as is so often the case in there, a surgery we had saved his life, potentially at the cost of quality of life.

When he woke from surgery with bilateral frontal low damage, he had essentially no impulse control left and so ah you know we rounded on him after surgery, saw that he was doing OK to our you know first guess at his health and we continued on to see our other patients and we were called back by his eighty year old recovery room nurse saying, you've got to come see your patient right away. Something's wrong and we walk in to see him and he points at his elderly nurse and says, SHE won't have sex with me. And, you know, was a parent at that moment, his frontal lobes were gone, and that person is never going to have reasonable human behavior again.

And that, you know, it's one of the most tragic ways to have a brain male function. But you know, anything, a brain does anything from control of hormone levels in your body to vision, to sensation, to, you know, the most obvious thing, which is muscle movement of any kind, from eye movement to moving your base up, all that comes out of the brain, all of IT can go wrong. Any of IT, any part of IT or all of IT.

Um so yeah, working with the brain is a the substance of the brain as a surgeon. Very high stakes. But you know once so while you get a chance to really help, you get a chance to fix something that seems unfixed ble and you have lazarus like miracles, not too uncommonly so. It's extremely satisfying as a career.

Could you share with us one of the more satisfying experiences or perhaps the top on tour of what qualifies as satisfying in .

the a surgery? Know, one of the relatively newer techniques that we do is, you know, someone comes in with a reasonably small tumor somewhere deep in the brain that hard to get to. The traditional approach to taking that out would involve cutting through a lot of good, Normal brain and disrupting a lot of neurons.

A lot of weight matter that, you know, kind of the wires connecting neurons. Then the modern approach involves a two millimeter drill hole in the kull down, which you can pass a little fiberoptic, kenya, and an attached to a laser, and just hit the tumor up deep inside the brain under direct M. R.

I visualization in real time. This person is in the MRI scanner. You're taking pictures are a second or so. As the tumor heats up, you can monitor the temperature and get IT exactly where you want IT where it's gna kill all those tumor cells, but not hurt hardly any of the brain surrounding IT. And so not uncommonly, nowadays, we have someone come in with a tumor that previously would have been catastrophic to read on, and we can eliminate that tumor with you leaving a poco and their skin with almost no visual uh after effects。

So that procedure that you just describe translators into Better clinical outcomes, meaning fewer call them side effects or collateral .

the image exactly right. Yeah we don't you know, even in cases that previously would have considered totally inOperable, say a tumor uh in the brain stem or a tumor in primary motor cortex or primary um verbal areas, brokers area where we would have expected to either not Operate or do catastrophic damage. Those people people sometimes now are coming out unescapable.

I'm very curious about the sort of a basic information about brain function that can be cleaned from these clinical approaches of lesions and strokes and um maybe even stimulation a sufferedst senior example of this patient that had bilateral frontal damage.

What do you think his lack of regulation reveals about the Normal functioning of the frontal lobes? Because I think the obvious answer to most people's going to be, well, the frontal lobes are Normally limiting in cultivation. But as we both know, because the brain has excitation and inhibitory neurons to sort of accelerators and breaks on community, that isn't necessarily the straight forward.

The answer IT could be for instance, at the frontal lobes are um acting as conductors right oh and are kind of um important but not the immediate players in determining impulsivity. So um two questions really what do you think the front of lobes are doing? Because i'm very intrigued by this human expanded real estate have a lot of IT compared to other animals and more generally, that what do you think damage of a given tissue a means in terms of understanding of the basic function of that .

tissue yeah IT very is I think from tissue to tissue um but I with respect to the front lobbs, I think they act as sort of A A filter they selectively are saying backward to the rest of the brain behind them um when part of your brain says that looks very attractive, I want to go grab IT and take IT you know out of the jewelry display case or know whatever um the front of lobes are saying you can if you go pay for at first right they're filtering the behavior there.

They're letting the impulse through maybe but in a controlled way. This is very high level, very broad, thinking about how the front lobes work. And that that patient I mentioned earlier is a great example of when they go wrong.

You know, he have this emplaced ort strange implies to be attracted to his nurse. That Normally would be easy for our front of lobes to say this is completely inappropriate, wrong setting, wrong a person runtime. In his case, he had nothing there and so even the slides inclination to to want something came right out to the surface. so. Filter, calming the rest of the brain down from acting on every possible impulse.

When I was a graduates, you, I was running water called, you know, these are what these are, but just important, what called acute, which are new physiological experiments at last several days because at the end you you terminate the animal this is my apologies to those that um are made uncomfortable by animal research. I now work on humans, so a different type of animal but at the time we were bring these acute that would start one day and and maybe end two or three days later and see you get a lot of data, the animals are necessary ze and doesn't feel any pain the entire time of the surgery.

But the one consequence of these experiments is that the experiment of me and another individual are awake for several days, with an hour sleep here, an hour sleep there, but you're basically awake for two, three days, something that really I could only do in my teens and twenties with my twenty at the time. And I were called going to eat at a dinner after one of these experiments, and I was very hungry. And the way, just walking by with a trail of food for another table, and IT took every bit of self control to not get up and take the food off the trade, something that, of course, is totally inappropriate and I would never do.

And IT must have been based on what you just said, that my forebrain was essentially going offline or offline from the sleep decoration, right? Because there was a moment there were, I thought I might reach up and grab a play of food, got passing by simply because I wanted IT and I didn't. But I can relate to the experience of feeling like the response is a flittering in and out under conditions of sleep deprivation. So do we know whether not sleep deprivation limits for brain activity in a similar kind of way?

I don't know specifically if that effect is more pronounced in the four brain as opposed other brain regions, but it's clear that sleep deprivation has brought effects all over the brain of people start to see visual whose nation so the opposite of the brain, as you know, the the visual cortex in the far back of the brain is affected people' le's motor coordination goes down after sleep deprivation so um I think you know if I if you forced ed me to give A A definitive answer on that question, I have to guess that the entire brain is affected by sleep deprivation and it's not clear that one part of the brain is more affected than another.

So we've been talking about damage to the brain and inferring function from damage. Maybe we can talk a little bit about when I considered really the holy grail of the nervous system, which is neuroplasticity was incredible capacity of the nerve system to change its wiring, strengthened connections, weaken connections, maybe new neurons, but probably more strengths and weakening of connections nowaday. We hear a lot of excitement about local classical psychodeviant psychology and sil sivan, which do seem to corton open plasticity.

They do a bunch other things too, but through the release of neuro dullah like sartori and so forth, how do you think about neuroplasticity? And more specifically, what do you think the potential for neuroplasticity is in the adult? So let's say, other than twenty five year old brain with or without machines being involved because in your role at neural ink and as a neurosurgeon in other clinical settings, um surely you are using machines and surely you've seen plasticity in the positive and negative direction, right? What do you think about plasticity? What's possible there without machines? What's possible with machines?

So as you mentioned or alluded to, the plasticity definitely goes down in older brains. Ah IT is harder for older people to learn new things, to make radical changes in their behavior, to you kick habits they've had for years. Machines aren't the obvious answer, so implanted electrodes and computers aren't the obvious answer to increase plasticity necessarily compared to h drugs.

We already know that there are pharmacologic, some of the ones you mentioned psychiatric that have a broad impact on plasticity. Yeah it's hard of which area of the brain would be most polite as a stimulation target for an electrode uh to broadly juice plasticity a compared to um you know pharmacological that we already know about. Um I think with plasticity you're talking in general, you're talking about the entire brain.

You're talking about altering you know a trillion synapses is all in a similar way uh, in their tendency to be revised to their tendency to be upward down, waited. And an al stimulation target in the brain necessarily has to be focused. You know, with a device like potentially nearly inks, there might be a more broad ability to steer current to multiple targets with some degree of control.

But you're never going to get that road target ability with any electrodes that I can see coming in our lifetimes, say that would be coating the entire surface and depth of the brain the way that a drug can. And so I think plasticity research will bear the most through when IT focuses on pharmacology. Agents wasn't .

expecting that answer, given that you're at neural link. And and then again, I think that all of us, me included, need to take a step back and realize that, well, we may think we know what is going on a neural link in terms of the specific goals and the general goals. And I certainly have in mind, I think most people have in mind a chip and planted in the brain, or maybe even the prefer nervous system that can give people super memories or some other augmented capacity.

We really don't know what you all are doing there for all we know um you as are taking or ministering suicide and and combining that was stimulation I mean we really don't know and I say this with the with a tone of excitement because I think that one of the things that so exciting about the different endeavors that iran has really spireas aded SpaceX tesla set up is that early on. There's there's a lot of mistake, right? You know mistake is equality that um is not often talked about but um is I think a very exciting time in which engineers are starting to toss up big problems and go ford and and obviously elon is certainly among the best, if not the best in terms of going really big.

Mean mars seems pretty far to me, right? Electric cars all over the road nowadays, very different than the picture a few years ago when you didn't see so many of them, rockets and so forth. And now the brain.

So to the extent that you are allowed, could you share with us what your vision for the missions at neural link are and what the general scope of missions are and then, um if possible, uh, share with us some of the more specific goals. I can imagine basic goals, trying to understand the brain and augment the brain. I could imagine clinical goals are trying to repair things in humans that are suffering in some way, or animals for that matter. Yeah.

it's it's funny. What what you mentioned neural ink and I think tesla space sets before I end up being these blank canvasses that people project their hopes and fears onto. And so we we experience a lot of upside.

And these people, you assume that we have superpowers in our ability to alter the way brain's work, and people have terrifying fears of the horrible things were going to do. For the most part, those extremes are not true. You know, we are making a neural implant.

We have a robotic insertion device that helps place tiny electrodes, the size smaller than the size of human hair, all throughout a small region of the brain. Uh, in in the first indication that we are aiming at, we are hoping to implant a series of these electors rods into the brains of people that have had a bad spinal court injury. So people that are essentially quadroon gic the have perfect brains, but they can't move use them to move their body. They can't move their arms .

or legs because of some high level final core damage.

Exactly right. And so this you pristine motorcar or text up in their brain is completely capable of Operating a human body. It's just not wired properly. Any law go to a human arms or legs.

And so our goal is to place this implant into a motor cortex and have that person be able to then control a computer so a mouse in a keyboard, as if they had their hands on a mouse in a keyboard. Even though they aren't moving their hands, their motor intentions are coming directly out of the brain into the device. And so they're able to regain their digital freedom ah and connect with the world through the internet.

Why use robotics to insert these chips? And the reason I asked that is that, sure I can imagine that a robot could be more precise or less precise, but in theory more precise than the human hand, no tremor for instance, right, more precision in terms of maybe even a little micro detection device on the the tip of the blade or um or something that could detect A A capital that you would want to avoid and swarm around that the human eye couldn't detect.

And you and I both know, however, that no two brains, nor are the two sides of the same brain identical, right? So navigating through the brain is perhaps best Carried out by a human, however. And here i'm going to interact myself again and say, ten years ago, face recognition was very clearly performed Better by humans, then machines. And I think now machines do IT Better. So is this the idea that eventually, or maybe even now, robots are Better surgeons than humans are .

in in this limited case? yes. Ah these electrodes are so tiny and the blood vessels on the surface of the brain so numerous and so densely packed that a human physically can do this.

A human hand is not steady enough to grab this couple micron with the loop uh at the end of our electoral thread and place IT accurate blindly, by the way, into the critical surface, accurate enough at the right debt to get through all the critical layers that we want to reach. And I would love if human surgeons were, you know, essential to this process. But very soon humans run out of motor skills sufficient to do this job. And so we are required, in this case, to lean on robots to do this incredibly precise, incredible, fast, incredibly numerous placement of electrodes into the right area of the brain.

So in some ways, neural link is pioneering the development of robotic surgeons as much as its pioneering the exploration and augmentation and treatment of human brain conditions.

right? And as device exists currently as we're submitting IT to the fda, is is only for the placement of the electrodes, the robot part of the surgery I or or another neurosurgeon still needs to do the you know, the more crude part of opening the skin and skull and presenting the robot pristine brain surface to sell electrodes into .

surely getting quite players. To be able to move again or maybe even to walk again is a heroic goal and one that I think everyone would agree would be wonderful to accomplish. Is that the first goal because it's hard but doable, right? Or is that the first goal because you and elan another folks at neural link um have a passion for um getting paralyzed people to move again yeah broadly speaking .

you know the mission of neural link is to reduce human suffering at least in the near term. You know there's hope that eventually there's a youth here that makes sense for a brain in interface to bring A I as a tool embedded in the brain that human can use to augment their capabilities. I think that's pretty far down the road for us, but definitely on a desired roadmap in the near term.

We really are focused on people with terrible medical problems. They have no options right now. Um with regard to motor control um you know our mutual friend recently departed Christian canoe was a giant in this field of motor or prosthesis IT just so happens that his work was foundational for a lot of people that work in this area, including us.

And he was an adviser in neural ink that work was farther along than most other work for a addressing any function that lives on the surface of the brain. The physical constraint of our approach require us currently to focus on only surface features on the brain so we can say, go to the really a very compelling a surface, uh, deep debt functions that happen in the brain like you know, mood, a appetite, addiction, pain, sleep. We'd love to get to that place eventually. But uh, in the immediate future, our first indication or two or three will probably be brain surface functions like motor control.

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Again, that's athletic Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five three travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 So for those listening, the hour portion of the brain, or filled with or consist of rather new cortex. So the bomb y stuff um that looks like sea coral um some forms of sea coral look like brains or brains look like them.

And then underneath resided a lot of the brain structures that control what matters referred to thinking and mood, hormonal output, how a waker or sleep the brain is. And would you agree that those deeper regions of the brain have, in some ways, more predictable functions? I mean, that lesions there or stimulation there lead to more predictable outcomes in terms of deficits .

or improvements in function yeah, in I M the deeper parts of brain to be more stereotyped as a more similar between species than the outer surface of the brain. There are kind of the firm where or the the housekeeping functions to some degree body temperature, blood pressure, sex, motivation um hunger, things that you don't really need to vary dramatically between a fox and a human being. Um where's the the outer more reasoning functions of problem solving functions between a fox and a human are vastly different. And so the physical requirements of those brain outputs are different.

I think I heard you long describe IT as the human brain is i'm essentially a monkey brain with a supercomputer placed on the outside now, which Sparks some interesting ideas about what neocortex is doing. We have all this brain real estate on top of all that more stereotyped function type stuff in the deepen brain. And it's still unclear what neo cortex is doing.

In the case of frontal cortex, as you mentioned earlier, it's clear that it's providing some quieting of of impulses, some context setting, rule setting, context switching. Um all of that makes good sense. But then there are a lot of core glorious that sure of volvic or touch hearing, but then there's also a lot of real state that just feels on unexplored. So i'm curious whether not in you are clinical work or work with neural linked or both, whether not you have ever encountered neons that do something that really peculiar and intriguing. And here i'm referred to examples that could be anywhere in the brain yeah like you like these neurons, when I stimulate them or when they're taken away, leads something kind of bizarre but .

interesting yeah yeah. There's the one that comes immediately to mind is unfortunately in a terrible case. And kids that have a tumor in the the hypotheses that lead to a what we call elastic seizure, which is sort of uncontrollable fit of laughter. There's been cases in the literature where this laughter is so uncontrollable and so pervasive that people suffocate from fAiling to breathe, where they laugh until they pass out um and so you know you don't Normally think of a deep structure in the brain like the hythe's as as being involved in the you know a function like uh humor and and certainly when we think about this kind of laughter and in these kids of tumor is uh merthyr ugh ter is the the kind textbook phrase um humorless laughter. It's just a reflective, almost zombie like behavior ah and that comes from very small population of neurons deep in the brain. This is one of the other sort of strange loss of functions you might say, you know, it's nice that you and I can sit here and not have constant disruptive fits of laughter coming out of our bodies um but that's a neural function that you think goodness to the neurons, properly wired and properly functioning and any neurons that do anything like this can be broken. So we see this in horrifying cases like that from time to time.

So i'm starting to sense that there are two broad bins of approaches to augmenting the brain, either to treat disease or for sake of increasing memory, creating super brains. Is that a one category you look to earlier, which is pharmacology? You specifically mention the tremendous power that pharma logy holds right with, not through psychodeviant x are through prescription drug, some other compound.

The other approach are these little micro electro des that are extremely strategically placed right into multiple regions in order to play essentially a concert of electricity that is exactly right to get a quarterly gic moving. That Sparks two questions. First of all, is there a role for and is neural link interested in combining pharmacology with stimulation?

So not immediately. Right now we're solely focused on the extremely hard, some might say, the hardest problem facing humans right now of decoding the brain through electrical stimulation and recording that's that's enough for us for now.

So um to just give us a bit full picture of this, we're talking about a patient who can't move their limbs because they have have final core damage. Um the motor core text that controlled movement is in theory, fine. You make a small hole in the skull and through that hole a robot is going to place electrodes s obviously motor cortex.

But then where how is the idea that you're going to play a concert from different locations? You can hit all the keys on the piano in different combinations and then figure out what can move the limbs. What i'm alluding to here is I still don't how the signals are going to a get auto motor cortex pass the lesion and into um and out to the limbs because the lesion hasn't been .

dealt with IT all in this scenario. To clarify, I should emphasize we're not in the immediate future talking about reconnecting the brain to the patient's own limbs. That's on the road map, but it's way down the the road map a few years. Um what we're talking about in the immediate future is having the person be able to control electronic devices around them with their motor intentions alone, right?

So brush that a can and in ARM or just mouse and keys on a mouse.

keys on a keyboard, for starters. So you ouldn't see anything in the world move as they have an intention the patient might imagine, say, flexing their fist or moving their wrist. And what would happen on the screen is the mouse would move down and left and click on an icon and bring up their word processor, and then a keyboard at the bottom of the screen would allow them to select letters in sequence and they could type. This is the easy place to start, easy and quotes.

I would say, because um the transformation of electrical signals from motor cortex through the brain stem into the spinal accordin out to the muscles is somewhat known for through one hundred years or more of incredible laboratory research. But the transformation meaning how to take the electrical signals out of motor cortex and put IT into A A mouse or a robot ARM, that's not a trivial problem. I mean, that's a whole other set of problems. In fact.

well, we're take we're unloading some of that difficulty from a from the brain itself, from the brain of the patient, and putting some of that up into software. So we're using smarter uh, algorithms to decode the motor intentions out of the brain. We have been able to do this in monkeys really well.

So we have, you know, a small army of monkeys playing video games for, you know, smoothly rewards and I do really well we actually have the world record of bit rate of information coming out of a monkey's brain to intelligently control a cursor on a screen. We're doing that Better than anyone else um and you know again thanks in no small part due to Christian canoe and his lab and the people that have worked for him that have been helping narrow link. But what you can do with that monkey is ask him what what he's thinking. You can ask him.

you ask him, but you won't get a very interesting answer.

You can't tell him to try something different. You can't tell him to have you know try their shoulder on this, try the other hand and see if there is some cross body, uh, non firing that that gives you useful signal. Once we get the people, uh, we expect to see what they've seen when theyve done similar work.

And academic labs, which is the the human can work with you to vastly accelerate this process and get much more interesting results. So one of the things out of out of stanford recently is there is a lab that, with Christian janne, henderson and and other people decode speech out of the hand movement area in the brain. So what we know is that there are you multitudes of useful signals in each area of the brain that we looked at so far. They just tend to be highly expressed for a hand moving in the hand area, but that doesn't mean only hand movement in the hand area.

So here's the confidence test. There's a long history dating back, really prior to the thousand nine hundred fifties, of scientists doing experiments on themselves. Sure, not because they are reckless, but because they want the exact sorts of information that you're talking about. The ability to really understand how intention and awareness of goals can shape outcomes in biology, if that is vague to people listening.

What I mean here is that for many, probably hundreds of years, if not longer, scientists have taken the drugs theyve studied or stimulated their own brain, or done things to really trying get a sense of what the animals they work on, or the patients they work on might be experiencing psychosis. Sort of famous for this, by the way, pointing fingers in anyway. But psychiatrists are known to try the drugs, the dead minister. And some people would probably imagine that a good thing, just that the conditions could have empathy for the sorts of side effects, and not so great effects of some of these drugs that paid minister to to patients.

But the confidence test I present you is, would you be willing or are you willing, if allowed to have these electrics implanted into your motor cortex? Yeah, you're not a quarter plea gic, right? You can move your limbs, but given the state of the technology in neural link now, would you do that? Or maybe in the next couple of years, if you are allowed, would you be willing to do that and be the person to say, hey, turn up the mulato over there? I feel like I want to reach for the cup, right, with that robotic ARM.

But i'm feeling kind of some resistance because it's exactly that kind of experiment done on A A person who can move their limbs and who deeply understands the technology and the goals of the experiment that I would argue actually stands to advances the technology fastest as opposed to putting the electro ATS first into somebody who is imparted a number of levels and then trying to think about why things aren't working right, right. And again, that this is all with the the goal of of reversing paralysis in mind. But would you implant yourself with these microelectrodes ATS?

Yeah, absolutely. I would be excited to do that. I think for the first iteration of the device, that probably wouldn't be very meaningful IT wouldn't be very useful because I can still move my limbs.

And our first outputs from these are things that I can do just as easily with my hands, right? Moving a Alice typing in a keyboard. Um we are necessarily making this device as a medical device, for starters, for people with bad medical problems and no good options.

Um IT wouldn't really make sense for an able body person to get one in the near term as the technology develops and we make devices specifically designed to perform functions that can't be done even by an able body person. Ah they eventually refine the technique to get to the point where you can type faster uh, with your mind and one of these devices then you can with text to speech, uh uh or speech to text and your fingers. That's a use case that makes sense for someone like me to get IT IT doesn't really make sense.

Get one when IT allows me to, you know, use a mouse slightly worse than I can with my hand currently. That said, the safety of the device I would absolutely vouch for from know the hundreds of surgeries that I personally done with this. I I think it's much safer than many of the industry standard fda approved surgeries that I routinely do on on patients that you are no one even thin twice about their standard of care. Uh, nearly link is already reached in my mind A A safety threshold that is far beyond a commonly accepted safety threshold along the lines of augmenting .

ones biological function or functions in the world. I think now the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand. For those listening not watching, there is a IT looks like A A small lump between um dark inc google um four finger in thun or next finger in thun um place on skin but on the top of his hand, you've had this for some years now because we've known each other for gosh, probably seven years now or so and you always had IT in the time i've known you what is that lump um and why did you put IT in there?

Yeah so it's A A small writable R F I D tag.

What's an R F I D? What is R F I D stanford ready for sequences .

identification um and so it's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can a temporarily power if you approached and antenna, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth. So most phones have the capability of reading and writing to this chip for years IT IT let me into my house and unlocked a debble on my front door.

Um for some years IT unlocked the doors of neural ink and let me through, you know the the various locked doors inside the building um IT is writable I can write a small amount of data to IT and so for some some years in early the early days of cypher, I had a crypto private key written on IT to store a crypto currency that I thought was know a dead offshoot of one of the main uh crypto currencies after and forked. And so I put the private wallet key on there and forgot about IT. And remember red a few years later that I was there and went and checked and I was worth know a few thousand dollars more than when I left IT on there. So that was a nice finding change in the sofa in the twenty first century.

And then when you say you read IT, you're essentially taking A A phone or other device and and scanning IT over the you are of the lump in your hand, so to speak. And then I can read the data from there yeah specially yeah what other source of things could won put into these is in theory, and how long can they stay in there before you need to take them out and yeah and recharge them and replace them?

Well, these are passive, their coded in biocompatible glass. And as an extra, i'm a rock climb and I was worried about that glass shattering and rock climbing. I additionally coded them in another ring of silicon before in planting that.

So it's it's pretty safe. They're passive. There's no battery. There's no active electronics in them so they could last the rest of my life. I don't think i'd ever have to remove IT.

Funny reason at some point, the technology is always improving so I might remove IT and upgrade IT. Um that's not inconceivable. Already there's ten ex more storage versions available that could be a drop in replacement for this if I ever remove IT. Um but you know he has a small niche youth case and it's an interesting proof of concept tiptoe towards the concept that you mentioned of you have to be willing to go through the things that you're suggesting to your patients in order to you say with a straight face that you think this is a reasonable thing to do. Um so a small subcutaneous implant in the hand, so a little different than a brain in plant.

But yeah what's involved in getting that R, F, D chip into the hand is IT. I'm assume it's an outpatient procedure. Present what you did IT on yourself.

Yeah, yeah. This was a kitchen table kind of procedure.

Any anesthetic or no? You know.

I i've seen people do this with lighting e injection. I, for my money, I think a lot in injection is probably as painful as just doing the procedures.

A little cut in skin on the top of the hand. Some people are ringing ing right now. Other people are saying, I want one because you never worry about losing your keys yeah or password.

I actually rely IT for password because dreadfully bad at remembering passwords to have to put them in places all over the place. And then like, I like that kid in that member that we stand by me where the kid hides the pennies under the the porch and the roses, the map. Yeah, spends all summer trying to find the, so I can relate.

yes. So a little is just a little slit. And then put in there, no local immune sense. No, no possible as well.

Materials are completely by compatible. They are on the surface, exposed to the body, no bad reaction, and healed up you in days. And he was fine.

very cool. Since we're on video here, maybe can you just maybe just and show us yeah ah so so were you not to point out that the long I won't known to to ask about IT but and any other members of your family have have these a few years .

after having this and saying the convenience of me being up open the door without keys, my wife insists the that I put one in her as well so she's walking round with one.

fantastic.

We consider them our sort, our version of wedding rings IT.

Well, certainly more permanent than wedding rings in in some sense. I can help but asked this question even though I might seem a little bit off topic as long as we're talking about implant devices and blue tooth and R F D chips in the body, I can ask a lot about um the safety or lack there of of a blue youth headphones.

Um you work on the brain or a brain surgeon um that's valuable real estate in there and you understand about electronic tic fields. And um any discussion about emf puts us in the category uh h like get their ten foil hat. And yet i've been researching E M S for a future episode of the podcasts.

And EMS are a real thing. That's not A A valuable statement. Everything's a real thing at some level, even an idea, but there does seem to be some evidence that electro magnetic fields of sufficient strength can alter the function of maybe the health of but the function of neural tissue, given the neutral tissue electrically singing among itself.

So um all disaster in a very straight ward way. Do you use bluetooth headphones or wired headphones? Yeah blue toth and you're not worried about any kind of uh em f fields .

across the school. No I mean I think the energy levels involved are so. Tiny that uh you know iona I zing radiation aside we're way out of the realm of iona.

I zing radiation that people worry about um you know tumor causing em f fields um even just the electron magnetic field itself as is very well described in a blue tooth um frequency range h the power levels are tiny uh in these devices. And so you know we are a washing these signals, whether you use blue to ten phones or not for that matter you you're getting bombarded with iona. I zing radiation in a very tiny amount no matter where you live on earth, unless he live under huge amount of water. Um it's unavoidable. And so I think you just have to trust that your body has the DNA repair mechanisms that IT needs to deal with the constant bath of ionizing radiation that you're in as a result of being in the universe and exposed to cosmic rays in terms of electronic tic fields, that it's just it's, you know, the energy levels are way, way out of the range where I would be worried about this.

What about heat? You know, I don't use the ear buds any longer for a couple of reasons. Once as as you know, I take a lot of supplements, and I reached to my left pocket once and swallow hand for supplements that included a blue tube, a airports pro.

I knew IT. I swallowed IT at the moment after I gulped down, by the way, folks, please don't do this. I was not a good idea with what IT wasn't.

An idea was a mistake. And but I could see IT on my phone as registering there. Never thought again.

So i'm assuming it's longer my but anyway, there's a bad joke there, to be sure. But in anything, I tend to lose them, replace them. So that's the main reason. But I didn't notice when I use them that there is some heat generated there. I also not convinced that plugging your years all day long as there are some ventilation through the through the science systems that include the ears.

So IT sounds to mean like you're not concerned about the use of of um your budget. But um what about heat near the brain? I mean the cocoa, the auditory mechanisms that is pretty close to the surface there um heat and neural tissue or not friends 是 and much to get my brain cold than heart yeah um in terms of keeping the cells healthy and alive。 And should we be thinking about the heat effects of some of these devices or other things as anything we're overlooking? Well.

think about that this way. I used cars as an analogy a lot, and, you know, mostly internal combustion engine cards. So these analogies are gna start to be foreign and useless for another generation of people that grow up in the area of electric cars. But using cars as as a platform to talk about fluid cooling systems, your body has a massive distributed fluid cooling systems somewhere to cars.

Radiator, you're pumping blood all around your body all the time at a very strictly controlled temperature that blood Carries a it's mostly water so IT Carries a huge amount of the heat um away or cold away from any area of the body that's focused heating or focused cooling. So you could put a nice cube on your skin until IT completely melts away and the blood is going to bring heat back to that area. You can put, you can stand in the sun under a much more scary heating rates from the sun itself that contain U.

V. radiation. That's that's definitely damaging your DNA. If you're looking for things to be afraid of.

the sun is a good one. Now you're talking to the guy that tells everybody get suddenly in their eyes every morning. But I don't want people to get burned or or give themselves skin and cancer.

I encouraging people to protect their skin accordingly. And and different individuals require different levels of protection from the sun. 是 some people do very well in a lot of sunshine， never get basic cell or anything like that.

Some people, and it's not just people. The very fair skin, a minimum of sun exposure can cause some issues. And here i'm trying about sun exposure to the skin, of course, staring at the sun as a bad idea. I never recommend .

thinking about the sun just as a heater, a for for a moment to compare with blue tooth headphones. Your body's very capable of Carrying that heat away and anticipating, you know, via sweat evaporation uh or you know temperature equalization. So any heat that's locally generated in the year when there's a pretty large bony barrier or there, but too there's a tony blood flow in the scale and in the head in general and definitely in the brain that's gona regulate that temperature. So I think certainly there can be a tiny temperature variation, but I doubt uh, very seriously that it's enough to cause a significant problem.

Like to go back to brain augmentation. You've made very clear that one of the first goals for neural link is to get quarter projects walking again and again. What a marvel goal that is. And I certainly hope you guys succeeded well.

again, just to be very clear, the first step is we we aren't reconnecting the patient's own muscle system to their motorcar.

allowing them, excuse me, agency over the movement of things in the world yes. And eventually their body and you're .

exactly right ah eventually their body. We would love to do that. And we've done a lot of work on developing a system for stimulating the spinal court itself. And so that gets to the question that you that you asked a few minutes ago of how do you reconnect the motor cortex to the rest of the body? Well, if you can bypass the damaged area of the spinal cord and have an implant in the spinal cord itself connected to an implant in the brain, and have them talking to each other, you can take the perfectly intact motor signals out of the the motor cortex and send them to the spinal cord, which most of the wiring should be attacked in the spinal cord below the level of, say, the the injury caused by a car acts that under motor psychologies that another gunshot under whatever and uh, you should be possible to reconnect the brain to the body in that way. So not out of the realm of possibility that you in some small number of years, that neural ink will be able to reconnect somebody's own body to their brain.

And here I just want to flag the hundred years or more of incredible work by basic scientists. Um the names that I learned about in my textbook says a graduate student like George open and that wall mean anything anyone, unless you are a scientist, is but to a perform some of the first of histin ted recordings out of motor cortex. Just simply asking, what sort of electrical patterns are present in motor cortex as an animal or human move, as a limb Christian, an oi being another major pioneer in this area and many others. And just really highlight in the fact the basic research where A A exploration of neural tissue is Carried out at the level of anatomy and physiology really sets down the pavement on the runway to do the sort of big clinical expeditions that you all at neural ink or doing yeah.

I can't be said enough that you know, we, broadly speaking, in an industry, sometimes are and sometimes stand on the shoulders of academic giants. They were the real pioneers that they they were involved in the grind for years and an unglorified, unglamorous way.

No stock option.

no stock options. And you know, the reward for all the hard work is a paper at the day that is read by a dozens of people. And so, you know, they were self less academic researchers that that made all this possible. And we all humanity and nerlinger owe them a massive debt of gratitude for all the hard work that we've done and continue to do.

I agree along lines of augmentation, early on in some of the public discussions about neural link that I overheard between iran in various podcast host set a, there were some lofty ideas set out that I think are still very much in play in people's minds. Things like, for instance, electrical stimulation of the hip campus that you so appropriately have worn on your shirt today.

The beautiful looks like either IT looks like a golgi or cohl rendition of the hip campus translates to see horse in in the area, the brain that's involved in learning, in memory, among other things. There was this idea thrown out that a chip or chips could be implant in the hip campus that would allow greater than Normal memory abilities. Perhaps that's one idea.

是 another idea that I heard about in these discussions was， for instance, that you would have some chips in your brain, and I would have some chips in my brain, and you, I could just sit here, look at, looking at each other, or not nodding or shaking our heads, and essentially hear each other thoughts, 是， which sounds outrageous. But of course, why not why should we constrain ourselves to, as our good friend, any chain? And who was a neural geant? IT was already on this podcast once before, said speech is just the shaping of breath as IT exits our logs.

Incredible, really, when you think about IT. But we don't necessarily need speech to hear and understand each other thoughts, because the neural signals that produced that shaping of the lungs come from some intention. And you know, I have some idea, although may not seem like IT, about what i'm going to say next. So is that possible that we could sit here and just hear each other thoughts? And also, how would do we restrict what the other .

person could hear? Well, so absolutely. I mean, think about the fact that we could do this right now if you pull out your phone and started texting me on my phone and I looked down and started texting you, we would be communicating without looking at each other or talking, uh, shifting that function from a phone to an implanted device IT requires no magic, a advance, no leap forward. Its technology, we already know how to do. Um if we say put a device and unless you control a keyboard and a mouse, which is our stated intention for our first human clinical trial.

or I against, i'm deliberately interrupting or I can text an entire team of people simultaneously and they can text me. And in theory, I could have a watch of thoughts and five, ten and fifty people could hear right or um probably more to their preference.

They could talk to me yeah and and so you know texting each other with our brains as maybe an uninspiring rendition list, but it's not a very difficult to imagine the implementation of the same device in a more verbally focus of the brain that allows you to more naturally speak the thoughts they are thinking and have me have them rendered into speech that I can hear um you know maybe via a bone conducting in plant so silently here.

or or not silently like I could, let's say I was getting off the plane and I want to let somebody at home know that I had arrived. I might be able to think in my mind, think they're first name, which might queue up A A device that would then play my voice to them and just got off the plane. I'm onna, grab my bag and then i'll give you .

a call right on their home, alex. A.

so that all possible. Meaning we know the origin of the neural signals, right? Rise to speech. We know the different mechanical and neural apparata like the colia ear drums at sara that trans do sound waves into electrical signals. Essentially all the pieces are known. We're just really talking about like refining yeah refining IT and reconfiguring IT is I mean, it's not an easy problem, but it's really an engineering problem rather than a neuroscience .

problem for that for that youth case, you nonverbal communication, you might say that's a solved problem in a very crude, disjointed way. Some labs have solved part one of IT. Some labs have solved part two of IT.

There are products out there that solve, say, the implanted ted bone conduction part of IT for the for the death community. Um there are there are no implementations i'm aware of. They are pulling all that together. And the one product that's a streamline package from end to end, I think that's a few years down the road.

And we, I think, have some hints of how easily or poorly people will adapt to these, let's call them, novel transformations. A few years ago was on instagram, and I saw a post from a woman, her name, kara Jacobs son and SHE is death since birth and can sign into some extent, can relive. But he was discussing new sensory. So this is A A device that translate sound in the environment into touch sensations on her hand arrest.

Um she's a admire of birds and all things avian and um I reach out to her about this device is very curious because this is a very interesting in use case of of neuroplasticity in the sensory domain just a fascination of mind and he said that yes indeed IT afforded her novel experience now when walking past, say, pigeons in the park, if they were to make some whatever sounds that pigeons make, that he would feel those sounds and that indeed IT enriched experience of those birds in ways that obviously wouldn't otherwise. I haven't followed up with her recently to find out whether or not ongoing use of new sensory has made for a Better, worse or of equivalent experience of avian in the world which are her is is the near obsession um so SHE delights them. What are your thoughts about an preferred devices like that preferable meaning outside of the the skull, no requirement for A A A surgery, do you think that there is a more immediate or even A A I just generally poor use case for poor feral devices? And do you think that those are going to be used more readily before the kind of brain surgery requiring devices are used?

Yeah um certainly the barrier to entry is lower. The barrier to adoption is low. You know if you're making a attack tile glove, that's hard to say no to when you can slip IT on and slip IT off and not not have to get your skin cut at all um what you know again, there is no perfect measure of the efficacy of a device of one device compared to another, especially across modalities.

But one one way that you can start to compare apples to oranges is bit rate useful information in or out of the brain as you transformed into digital data. And so you can put a single number on that. And you have to ask, when you look at a device like that, is, what is the bit rate in? What is the bit rate out? How much information are you able to usefully convey into the system and get out of the system, the body, uh, into the brain? And uh, I think there's what we've seen in the early stabs at this is that there's a very low thresh hold for bit rate on some of the devices that are trying to avoid a direct brain surgery.

Could you perhaps say what you just said? But in a way that people who aren't as familiar we're thinking about bit rates might, might, might be able to digest there? I'm afraid to myself, I I understand bit rate. I understand that adding a new channel of information is just that adding information are you saying it's important? Understand whether not that new information provides for novel function or experience to um to what extent is the the newness of that valid and adaptive?

Well, i'm saying more it's hard to measure utility in this space. It's hard to, you know put a single metric, single number on how useful or technology is. One crude way to try to get at that is, is bit rate. Think of IT as as back in the days of dialog modems, the bit rate of your modem is fifty, sixty.

ninety six. I can still hear the sound of the dialog in the background that was .

a bit rate that thankfully keep steadily going up and up and up. Your internet service provider gives you a number that is the maximum usable data that you can transmit back and forth from the internet. That's a useful way to think about these assistive devices. How much information are you able to get in into the brain and out of the brain usefully? Um and right now that that number is very small even compared to the old motors.

But you have to ask yourself, when you're looking at a technology, what's the ceiling? What's the theoretical maximum? And for a lot of these technologies, that theoretical maximum is is very low, disappointingly low, even if it's perfectly executed and and perfectly developed as a technology.

And I think the thing that attracts a lot of us to a technology like nearly is that the ceiling is incredibly high. There is no obvious reason that you can't interface with millions of neurons as this technology is refined and and developed further. So um that's the kind of why band, you know high band with brain interface that you want to develop.

If you're talking about in a semantic press that an AI assistant to your cognitive abilities, you know the more sigh fight things that we think about in the coming decades. So it's an important caveat when you're evaluating these technologies, they really want them to be something that you can expand off into the size. I so let's take this a step .

further because as you're saying this, i'm realizing that people have been doing exactly what neural ling is trying to do now for a very long time. Let me give you an example. People who are blind, who have no pattern vision, have used canes for a very long time.

Now the cane is not a chip, is not a electro de, not neo sensory, right? None of that stuff. What IT is is essentially A A stick that has an interface with a surface so IT swep back and forth across the ground and are translating what would otherwise be visual cues into some other sensory cues. And we know that blind people are very good at understanding um even when they are approaching they occur edge because they are integrating that information from the tip of the cane up through their SATA sensory cortex and their motor cortex with other things like the changes in the the wind in the sound as a round the corner and um here imagine a like a corner in semis, go downtown with you, get to the corner of completely different set of auditory accuse and very often we know and this because my laboratory y worked on visual repair for a long time.

I talked to a lot of blind people use different devices and navigational world that they aren't aware of the fact that they are integrating these other accused but they non there's do them subconsciously um and in doing so get pretty good at navigating with a king right now can isn't perfect but you can imagine the other form of of navigating as a blind person, which is to just attach yourself or attached to you another nervous system best that we know being a dog. Excited dog, 是 that can kill you again with stopping at a curbs edge or even if there are some individuals that my team， all sketchy dogs are also very good at sensing different alisal states another threat, danger. I mean, they're exquisite at IT, right? So you're what we're really talking about is taking a king or a another biological system, actually a whole nervous system, and saying.

This other nervous system job is to get you to navigate more safely through the world. In some sense, what new link is trying to do is that but with robotics to insert them and chips, which raises that the the question people say, finally a question. The question is this, we hear about BMI brain machine interface, which is really what nearing specializes in.

We also hear about AI, another example where there is great, promising, great fear. We hear about machine learning as well. To what extent can these bring machine interfaces learn the same way a seeing eye g would learn, but unlike a seeing eye dog, continue to learn over time and get Better and Better and Better because it's also listening to the nervous system that it's trying to support. Put simply, what is the role for A I machine learning in the type of work that you're doing?

That's a great question, right? I think you know IT goes both ways. Basically, what you're doing is taking a very crude software intelligence, I would say not exactly a full full blown AI, but some well design software that can adapt to changes in firing of the brain. And you're coupling IT with another form of intelligence and human intelligence, and your allowing the two to learn each other. So undoubted, the human that has a nurlan device will get Better at using IT overtime.

Undoubtedly, the software that the nearly engineers a have written will adapt to the firing patterns that that the device is able to record and over time focus in uh on meaningful signals toward movement, right? So if uh, a neuron is fire high firing rate when you intend to move, the mosques are up into the right IT doesn't know that when IT starts, when you first put this in, it's just a random series of signals as far as the chip knows. But you start correlation out with what the person what you know the person wants to do as expressed in a series of games.

So you you assume that you know that the person wants to move the mouse on the screen to the target that shown because you tell them that's the goal. And so you start correcting the activity um that you record when they're moving toward and up and right target on a screen with that firing pattern and similarly for up and left down and laugh down and right. And so you you develop a model semi intelligently in the software for what the person is intending to do and let the person run wild with IT for a while, and they start to get Better at using the model presented to them by the by the software as expressed by the mouths moving or not moving properly on the screen, right? So it's imagine a scenario where you're asking somebody to play piano, but the the sound that comes out of each key randomly shifts over time. Um very difficult problem but a human brain is good enough ah with the aid of soft to solve that problem and map well enough to a separable state that they're going to know how to use that mouse even when they say turn the device off for the night, come back with the next day and some of the signals have shifted.

You are describing this. I am recalling a recent experience. I got one of these roles to um exercise and I am well aware that there's a proper row stroke and there's a improper row stroke.

And most everybody, including me who has never been coached and rowing um gets on this thing and pushes with their legs impulse with their arms and back. And it's some mix of incorrect and maybe a smile of correct type execution. There's a function within the role that allows you kiss me to play a game where you can actually um every rose stroke you generate arrows on toward dark board. And IT knows whether not you're generating the appropriate forces of the given segment to the row, the initial poll when you're leaving back at sea and adjust the trajectory of the heroes so that when you do a proper rose joke, IT gets closer to a bull eye. And it's very satisfying because you now have a visual feedback that's unrelated to this um the kinds instructions that one would expect like oh you know hint your hip a bit more or splay your knees a bit more, reach more with your arms as or pull first with your back.

All the roles are probably clinging, I say, because they are realizing the what is exactly the point which is I don't know how to rope, but over time, simply by paying attention whether not the arrow is hitting the bull's eye or not, more or less frequently, you can improve your low stroke and get, as I understand, pretty close to optimal rose stroke um in the same way that if you had a coach there telling you, hey, do this and do that, what really talking about here is neuropace feedback. sure. So is that analogy similar to what you're describing?

That's a great analogy. You know you know really good at learning how to play games in software. So video games are an awesome platform for us to use as a training environment for people to get Better at a controlling these things. In fact, it's it's the default on the obvious way to do IT as to have people and monkeys play video games.

Do you play video games? yeah. sure. Which video games?

Let's see you play old ones. I'm a little mysta algic. So I like the old blizz game, starcraft and warcraft.

and I don't even know those. I remember the first apple computers. I, I, I, I go hold you forty .

forty four now as a few days .

ago there I can recall um my tysons punch out like the original intendo games with her brothers but the games so that the games you're describing, I recall that my energy is that that the newer games are are far more sophisticated .

in some respects. I did recently find time to play ay cyberpunk um which was really satisfying and maybe appropriate. It's a game where the characters are all fully modeled out with cybernetic plans.

No perfect. But you know the root of the game is run around to shoot things. So maybe not so different from duck hunter, whatever from our childhoods reason .

ask about video games is there's been some controversy as to whether not they are making Young brains Better or worse. And I think some of the work from adam gazelle lab at ucsf and other laboratories of showing that actually provided that children in particular and adults are also spending time in Normal face to call them more traditional of face to face interactions, that video games can actually make nervous systems, that is, people a much more proficient at learning and motor execution 是 um visual detection um and yeah .

there's some work a showing that surgeons are Better if they play video games。 So I try to squeeze in as a professional development activity. Great.

great. Well, i'm sure you're getting cheers from the um from those that like video games out there and some of the parents who are trying to get their kids to play, the fewer video games are crunching. But that's okay.

We'll let them settle. They're familiar disputes among themselves. Let's talk about pigs. sure. Neural link has been quite generous, I would say, in announcing their discoveries and their goals. I want to highlight this because I think it's quite unusual for a company to do this. I'm probably going to earn a few enemies by saying this despite the fact i've always oed apple devices.

And from the south bay know the apple design team is notoriously cypher about what they're going to do next to or when the next phone or computer is going to come out. Is is volt to um um a serious extent? Neural link has been pretty open about their goals with the understanding the goals change and have to change.

And one of the things that we've done, which I think is marvelously, they've held online symposia, where you and some other colleagues of mine from the neuroscience community, dane atoms, who have tremendous respect for, and elon and others, their neural link, have shared some of the progress that they have made in experimental animals. I'm highlighting this because I think if one takes a step back, I mean, just for most people to I know about and realized that there's experimenting on animals, implantation of electrodes, s and so on, is itself a pretty bold move because that understandably evoke some strong emotions um in people and in some people evoke extremely strong emotions. 是。

Neural link did want such sampoong where they showed implant devices in pigs, right? Then they did another one. You guys did another one where he was implant devices in monkeys, right? Assume at some point there will be one of these public symposium where the implant devices will be in a human.

What was the rational for using pigs? I'm told pigs are very nice creatures. Yeah, i'm told that they are quite smart. And for all my years as a neuroscientist and having worked, admittedly, on every species, from mice to cuttle fish to humans to hamsters ers, to confess various carnal species, which I no longer do, I work on humans now, for various reasons, I never in my life thought I would see a implant device in the cortex of a pig. 是 why work on pigs？

yes. Well, let me say first and newer link is almost entirely composed of animal loving people. The people in our link are obsessive animal lovers.

There are signs up all around the office in spontaneously put up by people within the organization. You talking about how we want to save animals. We want to protect the animals.

If there was any possible way to help people the way we want to help people without using animals in our research, we would do IT. Um it's just not known how to do that right now. And so we are completely restricted to making advances, to getting a device approval through the fda by first showing that it's incredibly safe in animals. And so as is the .

case for any medical advancement, essentially the the fda and the other governing bodies um oversee these types of experiments and ensure that they're done with a minimum of discomfort to the animals of course, but I think there's an inherent species m right in a in most humans, not all some people truly see equivalence between a lizard and a human lizard life being equivalent human life. Most human beings, I think in particular human beings who themselves are, have loved ones, are suffering from diseases that they hope could be cured at some point, view themselves as specious and feel that if you have to work on a biological system in order to solve the problem, working on non human animals first makes sense to most people. 是， but certainly there is a category of people that feels very strongly in the .

opposite direction. 是。 And you know, I think we would probably be having a very different conversation around animal research if we weren't we as a species, we as a culture weren't just casually slaughtering ing millions of animals to eat every single day.

And so that is a background against which that the really timely, miniscule number of animals used in research IT IT, becomes almost impossible to understand why someone would point to that ridiculously small number of animals used in research when the vast, vast majority of animals that humans use and and their lives are, are done for food or for fur. Are these other reasons that people know have historical use animals? So we in in that context, we do animal research because we have to, there's no other way around IT.

If tomorrow a laws were changed and the fda said, okay, you can do some of this early experimental in willing human participants, that would be a very interesting option. I think there be a lot of people that would step up and say, yes, I am willing to participate in early stage clinical research. You already volunteered yeah and I wouldn't be alone.

And that IT is a potential way that animals could maybe be spared being unwilling participants in this. On that note, to whatever extent possible, I think neural ink goes really, really far much, much farther than anyone. I've ever heard of any organization i've ever heard of any anything i've ever seen to give the animal's agency in every aspect of the research.

Um we have just an incredible team uh of people looking out for the animals and trying to design the experiment such that there as purely opt in as humanly possible. No animal has ever compelled to participate in experiments beyond the surgery itself. So if, say, on a given day, our star monkey pager doesn't want to play video games for smoothly, no one forces them to ever.

This is a very important point and I want to quee people to really what matt is saying here um obviously the animals are being researched on for neural links so they don't get to opt to opt out of the experiment. But what he saying is that they play these games during which neural signals are measured from the brain because theyve electrodes, and plant in their brain through a surgery that, thankfully to the brain, is painless, right? No pain receptors in the brain and are playing for reward.

This is very different, very different than the typical scenario laboratories around the world where people experiment on mice, monkeys, some kisses, pigs or other species in which the typical arrangement is to water, deprive the animals, we never do that and then have the animals work for their daily ration of water right? Um and some people are hearing this employee, wow, that's Barbara. And here i'm not trying to point fingers at the people doing that kind of work. I just think it's important that people understand how the work is done, right in order to motivate an animal to play a video game, depriving them of something that they you're for is a very efficient way to do that.

We don't do that. We they have free and full access to food this entire time. So they aren't hungry, they aren't thirsty. The only thing that would motivate them is if they want a treat extra to their Normal russians. Um but there there's never any deprivation, there's never any adverse negative stimuli that pushes them to do anything.

I say i'm impressed by that decision because training animals to do tasks in laboratory settings is very hard in the reason so many researchers have defaulted to water deprivation. And having animals work for a rational water is because, Frankly, IT works, right? IT allows people to finish their PHD or their postdoc more quickly, then having to wait around and try and figure out why the monkey isn't working that day.

In fact, having known a number people who've done these kinds of experiments that we ve never done them in my lab um my monkey is into working today is a common and among graduate to do this kind of work and for people who work on mice, okay. So this is very important information to get across. And there is no public relation statement woven into this is just we're talking about the nature of the research, but I think IT is important that people are aware of this.

Yeah, it's one of the one of the underappreciated innovations out of a new link is how far the animal care team has been able to to move in the direction of humane treatment of these guys.

wonderful. As an animal lover myself, I can only say wonderful. Why pigs? Yeah.

pigs are. You know, they're actually fairly commonly used in medical device research, more in the cardiac area. Their hearts are somewhat similar to human hearts. Have bigger are these pigs?

I seen little pigs and I seen big pig.

Yeah there's a arranged there's a bunch of different variety a pig. There's a bunch of different species that um you know you can optimize for different um characteristics. There is many pigs. There's york shores. There's A A lot of different kind of pigs that we use in different context when we're trying to optimize a certain characteristic.

Um so yeah the pigs are we don't necessarily need them to be smart or task performers, although occasionally we have you know trained them to walk on a td mill when we're studying how their limbs move for some of our spinal cord research. But we're not recording interesting, say, cognitive data out of their minds. They really just a biological platform with a skull is close enough in size and shaped to humans to be a valid platform to study the safety of the device.

Unlike a monkey or a human, a pig, I don't think, can reach out in and hit A A button or a liver. How they signaling that they saw or sense to something.

yeah. So again, the pigs are really just a safety platform to say the device is safety implant IT doesn't know breakdown or cause any kind of toxic reaction the monkeys are are really doing or heavy lifting in terms of ensuring that we're getting good signals out of the device that, that what we expect to see in humans is validated on the functional level in in monkey's. First.

let's talk about the skull. New years ago, you and I were enjoying a conversation about these very sorts of things that were discussing today, and he said, you know, this cull is actually a pretty lousy biological adaptation. Far Better would be a titanium plate, spoken like a true neurosurgeon with the rady receiver implanted in his hand.

But in all seriousness, yet drilling through the skull with a two millimeter hall, certain ly don't do this at home. Folks please don't do this. But um yes, that's a small entry site, but I think most people cringe when they hear about that or think about that. And IT obviously has to be done by a neurosurgeon with all the appropriate environmental conditions in place to limit infection.

What did you mean when you said that the skull is a poor adaptation in a titanium plate will be Better in particular? What does that mean in reference to things like traumatic brain injury? I mean, are human beings unnecessarily vulnerable at the level of traumatic brain injury because our skulls are just not hard enough?

You know, maybe i'm being too harsh about skull. The school is very good at what he does. Given the tools that we are working with as biologically organisms that develop in our mother's uterus, this kull is, you know, usually the appropriate size is one of the hardest things in your body.

That said, there are a couple puzzling vulnerabilities. Some of the thin bone in the skull is in the temporal region. This is neurosurgeons. We all know that i'm heading toward a feature that sometimes darkly is called god's little joke, where the very thin bone of the the temporal part of the skull has one of the largest arteries that goes to the lining of the brain, right attached to the inside of IT. And so this this bone, just to the side of your eye, tends to fracture if you struck there, and the sharp edges of that fractured bone very off and cut an artery called the middle and Angel artery that leads to a big blood club that crushes the brain that's have a lot of people with otherwise would be a relatively minor injury end up dying.

Is this large blood clot developing from high pressure red arterial blood that crashes the brain? Um and so why would you put the artery right on the inside of the very thin bone that's most likely to fracture? It's an enduring mystery, but this is probably the most obvious failure mode, the design of a human skull otherwise know in terms of general impact resistance, I think the brain is a very hard thing to protect and the the architecture of human anatomy, probably given all other possible architectures that can realized from.

development. It's not that bad really. Um one of the interesting features in terms of shock absorption that hopeful ly prevents a lot of traumatic brain injury is the flewed chief around the brain.

The brain you may know is it's mostly fat IT flutes in salt water in our brains. Our brains are all floating in salt water. And so with rapid acceleration deceleration, that h chief and salt water h as a marvelous protective uh cushion against development of bruising of the brain, say, or bleeding in the brain. And so I think for any flaws and the design that do exist, you you can imagine things being a lot worse and there's probably a lot fewer tbs than would exist if a human designer was taken a first crack at IT.

As you describe the the thinness of this temporal bone and in the presence of critical artery just beneath that. Thinking about most helmets. And here I also want to queue up the fact that, well, whenever we hear about tbi or CT rain injuring people always think football, hockey, but most traumatic brain injuries are things like car accidents or construction work, right? It's not football in hockey that for some reason football and hockey in boxing.

Yet all the attention, but my colleagues work on traumatic brain injury told me that most of the traumatic brain injury they see as somebody slips at a party and hit their head or um you know, was in a car accident to our environment, vironment tal accidents of various kinds. To my mind, most helmets don't actually cover this region close to the eyes. yeah.

So is is there also a failure of helmet engineering that I can understand why you would want to have your preferred vision out? The sides of your eyes prefer of your eyes. But IT seems to me if this is such critical, realistic, why why isn't IT being .

Better protected? You know i'm no expert helmets, but um I don't think we see a lot of epidium hematomas and sports injuries uh to get this kind of injury you usually need a really focal blunt trauma like the baseball bat to the head as a classic mechanism of injury uh that would lead to to a temporal bone fracture and epithelium atomic um with sports injuries.

You know you don't often see that, especially in football, with a you know a sharp, sharper uh, object coming in contact with the head and it's usually another helmet, right? Is the the mechanism vendor. Uh, so I I can't think of the top. I have an instance of this exact injury type in sports.

you spend a lot of time poking around in brains of humans. And well, I realize this is not your area of expertise. You are somebody who, I am aware cares about his health and the health of your family, and nothing, generally, people's health.

When you look out on the landscape of things that people can do and shouldn't do if their desires to keep their brain healthy do any any data or any particular practices come to mind. And I think we've all hurt. The obvious one, don't get a head injury if you do get a head injury, make sure he gets treated and don't get a second head injury. But those are sort of the um answers that um i'm able to give some curse about the answers that um props i'm not able to give.

Yeah well that you know the obvious ones is one that you you talk about a lot um and I see a lot of the the smoot ing wreckage of humanity you know in the Operating room and in the emergency room for people that come in. I worked my practice in send from cisco right next to the tender line and saw a lot of people that end up coming in from the tender line have been drinking just spectacular amounts of alcohol for a long time.

And their brains are very often on the scans that look like small walnuts inside their empty. There's so much atrophy that happens with an an alcohol soaked brain chronically uh that um I would say that you know far and away the most common source of brain damage that many of us just volunteer for uh and it's you know when you look at the mobility kind of the human harm in aggregate that's done. It's mystifying that that it's um not something that we are all paranoid about which .

people think that I don't drink at all. I occasionally have a drink I I could take a relief at, Frankly, all the alcohol. The plant disappeared, I went notice, but I I do occasionally have a drink, maybe one per year or something like that, but I am shocked at the current state of affairs around alcohol consumption and advertising.

Its Better when I look at the data, mainly out of the U K. Brain bank, which basically shows that for every drink that one has on a regular basis, when you go from zero to one drink per week, there's more brain atrophy, thinning of the grain matter cortex, you go from one to two, more thinning you go from two to three. And there's a near linear relationship between the amount that people are drinking, the amount of brain atrophy. And to me it's like it's a sort obvious from the these large scale studies that um as you point out, alcohol atrophy, the brain IT kills neurons and I don't have any bias against alcohol people that drink, I know many of them but IT does seem to meet kind of shocking that we're talking about you know the rest very tall and red wine which is that you know in fantasy small amounts and unclear rest. Charles, good for us anyway by the way, a matter of debate should point out but so alcohol certain ly alcoa and access is bad for the brain in terms of because we have head hits, bad alcohol, bad year working as you mentioned you the tender line is really awareness that um ef me news can can disrupt in structure function.

No, that's not an area that I spent a lot of time researching and you know I incidentally take care of people that have used every substance known to man and quantities that are spectacular. But I I haven't specifically done research in that area, not super well versed on the literature.

I asking part because maybe you know a colleague or will come across a colleague who is working on this. There's just such a an incredible increase in the use of things like ata all riddle in model or model final, which I think in small amounts in clan clinically proscribed situations can be very beneficial. But let's be honest, many people are using these on chronic basis. I don't think we really know what IT does to the brain aside from increasing addiction for those substantives.

That's very clear. Well, for Better, worse, we're generating a massive data set right now.

Well put, i'd like to grief ly go back .

to our earlier discussion .

about neuroplasticity made an interesting statement, which is that we are not aware of any single brain area that one can stimulate in to invoke plasticity, the smaller body of neural architecture. Um years ago mike moser ic and colleagues at usf did some experiments where they simula nuclear specialises and pair that stimulation with a killer arts tone.

Or in some cases, they could also stimulate a different brain area, the venture tegmental area, which caused released of dopamine impera with a tone. And and in IT seemed in every one of these cases they observed massive plasticity. Now I look at those data and I compare them to the kind of classic data, I think IT was coral ashly that did these experiments where they're taking animals, and they had scoop out a little bit cortex, put the animal back into a learning environment.

And the animal do pretty well, if not perfectly so, the'd school about a different regional cortex in a different animal. And by the end of maybe three, four years of these kinds luan experiments, they um referred to the equal potential of the cortex, meaning they concluded that I didn't matter which piece of the cortex you took out, that there was no one critical area. So on the one end you've got these experiments that say, no, I do not really need a lot of the brain and and everyone, so well, a new story will come out where a patient person will going for a brain, can for some other reason, or an experiment.

And the person seems perfectly Normal, and they like missing their cortex, right? And then on the other end, any of these experiments, like the stimulation of basis or vta, will get massive plasticity from simulation of one area. I was i've never been able to reconcile these kinds of description findings. And so i'd really like just your opinion on this. You know what is IT about the brain as an organ that let IT be of so critical at the level of individual neurons and circuit is so so critical and yet at the same time um it's able to uh circumstances what would otherwise seem like massive lesions and halls yeah in itself yeah I mean.

a lot of a lot of IT to reconcile those experiments first account for the fact there are probably in different species, right? You take out particular portion of a pig rabbit brain, a small amount, you might not see a difference, but a small portion of a human brain, say the part most interested in coordinating speech or finger movement, you going to see profound losses or or visual core tex rate, take out a small portion of v one and you you'll have a visual deficit um and so species matters, uh, age matters.

If you take out half of the brain in a very Young baby, the baby has a reasonable chance of developing high, high degree of function by having the remaining half subsume some of the functions lost on the other side because they're very, very Young and their brain is still developing. It's to some degree of blank sleep with extremely high plasticity over many years. So that can overcome a lot of deficits.

Um taking an adult animals brain that isn't very well differentiated functionally to begin with, you might not see those deficits. So apparently there's a lot of redundancy as well, right? There's a lot of cereBellar and spinal circuits in other animals that generate stereotype behavior patterns might not need the brain at all to to perform, say, a walking movement or or some other sequences of motor activities. So um a lot of that depends on the experimental set up. I would say in general, adult humans are very vulnerable to losing small parts of their brains and losing discrete functions.

I'm going na take the liberty of asking a question that merges across neural link and tesla. I could imagine .

that cars.

whether not there on autopilot mode, or being driven by the human directly and society generally, would benefit from knowing whether not human is very alert or sleepy. 是， i don't know, a tesla, perhaps this technology already exists. But is there any idea that a simple sensor, maybe, even though just iid position or pupil size or head position, could be introduced to a car like the tesla or another car for that matter? yeah.

And resolve a common problem, which is that when people are lesser t not just when people fall asleep, but the simple drop in alertness that occurs when people are sleepy is my read of the data is responsible for approximately a third. Third is incredible of accidents between the vehicles. And then of course, some percent of those are going to be lethal accidents. So in terms of preserving life, this might seem like a minor case was actually a major case.

I have no special insight and to how tesla software works. I know they have brilliant engineers. When I I have a tesler, when I drive IT IT seems to know when i'm looking at the road versus not, and IT yells at me, if i'm not looking at the roads.

how to do that and .

what voice doesn't IT use. There is a small camera by the review, and I think it's a simple eyes track. My my guess here is that it's a simple eyes track in program and so IT may already be the case that is implemented that it's detecting whether your eyes are open or not. Obviously, you know it's not strict. It's not stringent because sunglasses um and i've i've seen forms on the internet ork people tape over that small camera so .

so they can voice good this.

But you know I think they're definitely making efforts to try to try to save lives here.

Incredible I saying incredible just because I think i'm fortune ough to live in a lifetime where there there were no electric cars and I was growing up and now things are moving fast. No one intended what is your wish for brain machine interface and rain augmentation? So let's assume that the clinical stuff can be worked out or maybe you have A A pet clinical condition that you just are just learning to see resolved.

That would be fine to. But in addition of that way, you really just expand out, let's say, we can extend your life two hundred years or we're thinking about the kind of world that your children are going to live in and their grandchildren will live in. What do you think is really possible with brain augmentation and brain machine interface? And here, please feel no bias whatsoever to answer in a way that reveals to us you, your incredible empathy and consideration, clinical conditions, because that's how you spend your days, is fixing patients and helping their lives be Better. So if IT lends on that quality, great. But for sake of a fun and for sake of delight and for sake of really getting us, the audience to to understand what's really possible here, please feel no shawls.

Yeah ah well, you know I i'd love the idea down the road and we're talking you know ten years, maybe twenty years time frame of humans just getting control over some of the horrible lazer that their rains go wrong, right? So I think everybody at this point has either known someone, or second or or known someone, a friend of a friend, who has been touched by addiction or depression, suicide, obesity, these functions of the grain, or or malfunctions of the grain, or what drives me, these are the things that I want to tackle in my career.

You know, in terms of my kid's lifetime, i'm thinking, you know, full human expansion of human cognition into, uh, A I full uh, emerge in the internet of your cognitive abilities are having no limitation for what you think as bottles neck by needing to read the wikipedia article first to have the data to inform your thoughts um having communication with anyone that you want to uh unrestricted by this flapping air past meat on your face. It's a you know a means of communication that's ridiculously prone to being misunderstood. It's also a tiny narrow bottles neck of communication were trying to send messages back and forth through a tiny straw.

And there is no reason that needs to necessarily be true. It's the way things i've always been, but IT isn't the way things are going to be in the future. And I think there's A A million very simple fied possibilities in terms of pending human minds together to be even more potent as as a multi unit organism um you know as an option um multi brain ah you know these are things that are so far down the road I can even directly see how they would be implemented.

But the technology were working on is a little crack in the door that allows some of this stuff to even be thought about in a realistic way to that. To that point, I you know encourage anyone who is, you know excited about things like that, you know, especially mechanical engineers, software engineers, robotics engineers, come to the nearly in website and look at the jobs we've got. We need the brightest st people in the planet working on these, the hardest problems in the world, in my opinion. And so if you want to work on this stuff can help us.

I have several responses. And to what you just said, first off, i'll get the least important one out of the way, which is that years ago, I applied for a job at neural link. The neural link website at that time was incredibly sparse, right? He was just a neural link.

And I said, if you're interested, give us your email. So I put my email there. I got no response. So um the they made a wise choice in the now fast forward several years, I am very grateful and I think very lucky that you who passed through, fortunately for me, through my lab at one point and we had some fun expeditions together in the wild neural explorations.

So we'll talk about some other time as well as i'm learning from you as you pass through your time at stanford um but have arrived there neural lincoln and i'll say they're very lucky to have you and folks like dan atoms who have known for very long time so phenomenal neurosurgeons like yourself, neuroscientists and vision scientists like dan and others. It's really an incredible mission. So I really want to start off by saying thank you to you and all your colleagues there. I know that neural link is really tip of the sphere and being public facing with the kinds of things they're doing and and being so forthcoming about how that work is done in animals and exactly what they're doing. And that's a very brave stance to take yeah, especially given the nature of the work.

But well, that's classic elon, right? He he doesn't keep secrets in public too commonly. He tells you what he's going to do and then he does IT. And people are always amazed by that. He releases the tesla master plan and tells you exactly what the company intends to do for the next several years.

And people assume that there some subterfuge that he is misdirecting, but it's it's right out there in the open and I think nearly follows in that path of we want people to know what we're doing. We want the brightest test people in the world to come help us. We want to be able to help patients. We want you know the most motivated patients with quality pledge a visit, our patient registry and and sign up to be considered for clinical trials that, that will happen in the future.

We'll put a link to that, by the way. So maybe just the direct call could now so you uh, this is for people who are quite pleasant or who know people who are quite plagiary, who are interesting being part of this clinical trial.

It's a patient registry right now that we're just collecting information to see who might be eligible for clinical trials that will happen in the future. We're still working with the fda to hammer out the details and and get their final permission to proceed with the trial.

right? So please see the in the the links, excuse me, in the shown o captions for that. Yeah I want to think for your stance in public facing and also doing the incredibly hard work, also think the robotics aspect, which you've clarified for me today is extremely forward thinking and absolutely critical. So a lot of critical engineering that no doubt will wake out into other domains of neurosurgery and medical technology, not just serving neurosis mission directly.

And I really want to thank you, uh, first of all, for coming here today and taking time out of your important schedule of seeing patients and doing brain surgery literally have to do time away from your family and time away from your mission at neurolinguistic to um to share with people what you guys are doing. As I mentioned before, there's a lot of mistake around in and even despite the that that a neural ink has gone out of the way to try and to raise some of that. Mike, this to me is the clearest picture ever, to my knowledge, that has given about what's going on there and the stated in the real mission and what's going on at the level of of of nutts inbox and guts and rains and this kind of thing. And I really just want to thank you also for for being you, which is perhaps sounds like a kind of an odd thing to hear but I think as made apparent by the device planted in your hand, if you don't just um do this for a job, you live and breathe and truly embody this stuff around the nervous system and trying to figure out how to fix IT, how to make IT Better and you live in be that and I know you're deep love for IT so I want to thank you for not just the brains that you put into IT and the energy you put into IT but also for that the heart that you put into IT.

Thanks for that, Andrew. Appreciate that. We just want to help people. We want to make things Better.

Well, I know that to be true knowing you. And thank you again for coming here today. And I look forward to another round of discussion. And whenever the time happens to be when these incredible technologies have spelled out to the next major milestone, thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor Matthew c.

Google all about the human brain and how IT functions, how IT breaks down and the incredible efforts that are being Carried out at neural link in order to overcome diseases of brain and nervous system function to augment how the human brain works. If you like to learn more about doctorate, google's work and the specific work being done at neural link, please see the links that we provided in the shown note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribed our youtube channel.

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