Musk’s Neuralink seeks volunteers for brain implants—who’s in?

Enlarge / An on-stage demo of the surgical robot. That could be you. (credit: Neuralink)

After years of delays, regulatory rejections, and allegations of animal abuse, Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, is now recruiting its first human volunteers to have an experimental robot implant an experimental device directly into their brains.

In a blog post Tuesday, the company announced that an independent institutional review board and an unnamed hospital site granted approval for the trial to start recruiting volunteers.

Neuralink says it aims to enroll people with quadriplegia due to a spinal cord injury or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Volunteers will have a wireless brain-computer interface implant, dubbed N1, surgically embedded into their brains by the company's experimental surgical robot, R1. The implant device is said to have 1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads thinner than a human hair. After R1 inserts the threads into the appropriate brain region, the electrodes are designed to record neural activity related to movement intention, and an experimental app from the company will decode the signals. The goal of the N1 implantation is to allow trial participants to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. This trial will primarily evaluate safety, but also get a glimpse of efficacy, Neuralink says.