Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Matthew MacDougall dr. Matthew McDougal 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.
The development of Novel devices in order to change the ways that human brains work for the better. Today's conversation with dr. Matthew McDougal is a truly special one because I and many others in science and medicine, consider neurosurgeons, the astronauts of Neuroscience, and 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 their probing and cutting.
Ting, Etc. And able to monitor how people's cognition and behavior and speech changes. As the brain itself, has changed structurally and functionally today's discussion with dr. McDougall will teach you how the brain works through the lens of a neurosurgeon. It will also teach you about neural link specific perspective about which challenges of 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 peripheral nervous system. In fact, one thing that you'll learn is that dr. McDougall has a radio receiver implanted in the periphery 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 novel 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 in planted, his family members with similar devices. So while 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 to 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 dr. McDougall also generously takes us under the hood, so to speak of what's happening at neurolink, explaining exactly the sorts 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 probing brain function and in devising and improving the human brain. And in
Coming disease in terms of neurosurgery and neural links goals by the end of today's episode. You will have a much clearer understanding of how human brains work and how they can be improved by Robotics and engineering. And you will have a very clear picture of what neural link is doing toward these goals dr. McDougal did his medical training at the University of California, San Diego and at Stanford University School of Medicine. And of course, is now at neural link. So he is in a unique stance to teach us about human brain function and dysfunction 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 desire and 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. Our first sponsor is H VM. N Ketone IQ H VM, n Ketone, IQ increases blood ketones. I want to be very clear.
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Dot-com / huberman and use the code huberman at checkout to get 10% off your first box and now for my discussion with dr. Matthew MacDougall dr. McDougall welcome good to
be here, nice to see you.
Andrew, great to see you again. I will get into our our history a little bit later but just to kick things off as a neurosurgeon and as a neuroscientist. Can you share with us your vision of the brain as an organ as it relates to, what's possible?
There, I met think most everyone understands that the brain is along with the body, the seat of our cognition feelings. Our ability to move etcetera and that damage their can limit our ability to feel the way we want to feel or move the way we want to move. But surgeons tend to view the world a little bit differently than 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 conceptualize 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 it could create a you know, human a human set of behaviors and a life 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 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, duct-taped together in this, in this bone box attached to your head and sometimes you see very interesting, failure modes. So, one of the most memorable patients I ever had, was very early on, in my training. I was down at UC San Diego.
And saw a very young guy who had just been in a car accident, we had operated on him and you know as is so often the case in neurosurgery, we had saved his life potentially at the cost of quality of life. When he woke up from surgery with bilateral frontal, lobe damage, he had essentially no impulse control left. And so, you know, we rounded on him after surgery saw that he
Doing. Okay to our first guests at his health and we continued on to see our other patients. We were called back by his, you know, 80 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 it his elderly nurse and says she won't have sex with me and you know it was Apparent at that moment. His frontal lobes were gone and that person is never going.
Going to have reasonable human behavior again. And that's you know, it's one of the most tragic ways to have a brain malfunction. 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, moving your bicep, all that comes out of the
Not all of, it can go wrong. Any of it, any part of it or all of it. So yeah, working with the brain is the substance of the brain as a surgeon, very high stakes. But you know, once in a while you get a chance to really help you get a chance to fix something that seems unfixable and you have, you know, Lazarus like Miracles, not not to uncommonly. So it's extremely satisfying as a career.
A share with us, one of the more satisfying experiences for or perhaps the top Contour of what qualifies a satisfying, and
neurosurgery. Yeah, you 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's 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
One's a lot of white matter that, you know, kind of the wires connecting neurons. Then the modern approach involves a 2 millimeter drill hole in the skull of the down, which you can pass a little fiber, optic cannula and and attach it to a laser and just heat the tumor up deep inside the brain under direct MRI visualization in real time. So you're this person is in the MRI scanner. You're taking pictures every second or so as the
Summer heats up, you can monitor the temperature and get it. Exactly where you want it, where it's going to 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 operate on. And we can eliminate that tumor with, you know, leaving a poke hole in their skin, with almost no visual After
Effects. So,
That procedure that you just described translates into better clinical outcomes meaning fewer, it's called them side effects or collateral
damage. Exactly. Right. Yeah. We don't, you know, even in cases, that previously would have considered totally inoperable. Say a tumor in the brain stem or a tumor in primary motor cortex or primary verbal areas, Broca's area, where we would have expected.
Add to either not operate or do catastrophic damage those people sometimes now are coming out, unscathed,
I'm very curious about the sorts of basic information about brain function that can be gleaned from these clinical approaches of lesions and strokes and maybe even stimulation. So for instance, in your 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 is going to be, well, the frontal lobes are normally limiting impulsivity, right? But as we both know, because the brain has excitatory and inhibitory neurons to sort of accelerators and brakes on communication, right? That isn't necessarily the straightforward answer. It could be for instance, that the frontal lobes are acting as conductors, right?
And are kind of important but not the immediate players and determining impulsivity. So, two questions really. What do you think the frontal lobes are doing? Because I'm very intrigued by this human expanded real estate, you have a lot of it compared to other animals and more. Generally that what do you think damage of a given? Neural tissue means in terms of understanding the basic function of that tissue.
Yeah, it varies I think
From tissue to tissue. But with respect to the frontal lobes, I think they act as sort of a filter. They selectively or saying, backward to the rest of the brain behind them. 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, you know, whatever the frontal lobes are saying you can, if you go pay for it first right there, filtering the behavior there.
They're letting be impulse through maybe, but in a controlled way. This is very high level, very broad thinking about how the frontal lobes work and that, that patient I mentioned earlier is a great example of when they go wrong. You know, he had this impulse sort of strange, impulse to be attracted to his nurse. That normally, it would be easy for our frontal lobes to say, this is completely inappropriate wrong.
Setting wrong person. Wrong time. In his case, he had nothing there. And so even the slightest inclination to, to want something came, right out to the surface. So, yeah, a filter calming the rest of the brain down from acting on every possible.
Impulse. When I was a graduate student I was running what are called a, you know, these what these are. But just to inform you what are called acute
Our neuro physiological experiments that last several days because at the end, you you terminate the animal, this isn't my apologies to those that are made uncomfortable by animal research. I now work on humans, so a different type of animal but at the time we were running these acutes that would start one day and maybe end two or three days later. And so you get a lot of data, the animals, anesthetized and doesn't feel any pain, the entire time of the surgery but the one consequence of these experiments is that the experimenter me and another individual are
Wake for several days, with an hour of sleep, here, an hour sleep there, but you're basically awake for 23 days. Something that really, I could only do in my teens and 20s. I was in my 20s at the time and I recall going to eat at a diner. After one of these experiments, and I was very hungry and the waitress walking by with a tray full of food for another table and it took every bit of self-control to not get up and take the food off the tray, something that of course is totally inappropriate.
Britt and I would never do, and it must have been based on what you just said that my for rain was essentially going offline or offline from the sleep deprivation. Right? Because there was a moment there where I thought I might reach up and grab a plate of food passing by simply because I wanted it right? And I didn't, but I can relate to the experience of feeling like the response is a flickering in and out, under conditions of sleep deprivation. So do we know whether or not sleep?
Deprivation limits for brain activity in a similar kind of way.
You know, I don't know specifically if that effect is more pronounced in the forebrain as opposed to other brain regions, but it's clear that sleep, deprivation has brought effects all over the brain. People start to see visual hallucinations so the opposite end of the brain. As you know, the visual cortex in the far back of the brain is affected. People People's Court and motor coordination goes down after
Sleep deprivation. So I think, you know, if I if you force me to give a definitive answer on that question, I'd 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. We could talk a little bit about what I consider really the Holy Grail of the nervous system which is
Last Issa T this incredible capacity of the nervous system to change. Its wiring strengthen connections, we can connections maybe new neurons for probably more strengthening and weakening of connections, right? Nowadays, we are a lot of excitement about so-called classical psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, which do seem to quote, unquote open plasticity. They do a bunch of other things too, but through the release of neuromodulators like serotonin and so forth. How do you think about neuroplasticity? And
Specifically, what do you think the potential for neuroplasticity is in the adult? So let's say older than 25 year old brain with or without machines being involved. Yeah. Because in your role at neural link and as a neurosurgeon in other clinical settings, 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?
R without machines, what's possible with machines.
So, as you mentioned or alluded to that plasticity definitely goes down in older brains. It is harder for older people to learn new things to make radical changes in their behavior to, you know, kick habits that 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 drugs. We already know that there are pharmacologic. Some of the ones you mentioned psychedelics. They have a broad impact on plasticity. Yeah, it's hard to know which area of the brain would be most potent as a stimulation Target for an electrode to broadly juice plasticity compared to
No pharmacologic agents that we already know about. 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 all in a similar way in their tendency to be rewire bubble to their tendency to be up or down waited and an electrical stimulation Target in the brain necessarily has to be focused.
You know, with the device like potentially neural links. 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 broad Target ability with any electrodes that I can see coming in our lifetimes. So say that would be coding the entire surface and depth of the brain. The way that a drug can. And so I think plasticity research will
Bear the most fruit when it focuses on pharmacologic
agents. I wasn't expecting that answer given that you're at neural link and and then again, I think that all of us me included the to take a step back and realize that while we may think we know what is going on at 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 implanted in the brain, or maybe even the peripheral 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 you guys are taking or administering psilocybin and combining that with stimulation of mean we really don't know and I say this with a with a tone of excitement because I think that one of the things that so exciting about the different Endeavors that Elon has really spearheaded SpaceX Tesla Etc. Is that early?
On. There's there's a lot of Mystique right now, Mystique is a quality that is not often talked about, but it's, I think a very exciting time in which Engineers are starting to toss a big problems and go for it. 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 are all over the road. Nowadays is very different than the picture a few years ago, right. When
I 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 if possible share with us some of the more specific goals, I can imagine basic goals of trying to understand the brain and augment the brain. I could imagine clinical goals are trying to repair things in human.
That are suffering in some way or animals for that
matter. Yeah it's it's funny what you mentioned neurolink and I think Tesla and SpaceX before it end up being these blank canvases that people project their hopes and fears onto. And so we we experience a lot of upside in this people. You know, assume that we have super powers in our ability, to alter the way brains work. And people have terrifying, fears of the horrible things. We're 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 a human hair, all throughout a small region of the brain in the first indication that we're aiming at. We are hoping to implant a series of these electrodes into the brains.
Of people that have had a bad spinal cord injury. So people that are essentially quadriplegic, they 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 spinal cord damage,
exactly, right? And so this, you know, pristine motor cortex up in their brain is completely capable of operating a human body. It's just not wired properly, any longer to a human's 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 and a keyboard as if they had their hands on a mouse and 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 and connect with the world through the internet. Why use
Robotics to insert these chips and the reason I ask 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, or something that could detect, a capillary, that you would want to avoid and swerve.
Around that human I 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 interrupt myself again and say 10 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 this limited case? Yes, 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't do this. A human hand is not steady enough to grab this, you know, couple Micron width Loop
loop at the end of our electrode thread and place it accurately blindly, by the way, into the cortical surface accurately enough at the right depth to get through all the cortical 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,
Are required in this case to lean on robots, to do this incredibly precise, incredibly 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 the device exists currently, as we're submitting it to the FDA, it is,
Is only for the placement of the electrodes. The robot is part of the surgery, I or another neurosurgeon still needs to do the you know the more crude part of opening the skin and skull and presenting the robot a pristine brain service surface to. So electrodes into
surely getting quadriplegics 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 Ilan and other folks at neurolink have a passion for 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 use here that makes sense for a
A nymph interface to bring AI 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 with regard to motor control, you know, our mutual friend, recently Departed,
Krishna shenoy was a giant in this field of motor 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 to knurling that work was farther along than most other work for addressing any function that lives on the surface of the brain, the physical constraints of our approach require us currently to focus on only
Only surface features on the brain so we can't say go to the really very compelling surface deep depth functions that happen in the brain. Like, you know, mood appetite addiction pain sleep. We'd love to get to that place eventually. But in the immediate future, our first indication or two or three will probably be brain surface functions, like motor
control.
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Sea coral look like brains our brains look like them. And then underneath reside, a lot of the brain structures that control, what, Matt, just referred to something controlling mood hormone output, how awake or asleep 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, their lead to more predictable outcomes in terms of deficits or improvements and
function. Yeah.
Yeah in some way. Yes. I mean the the deeper parts of the brain tend to be more stereotyped as in more similar between species than the the outer surface of the brain. They're kind of the firmware or the housekeeping functions to some degree body temperature blood pressure, sex motivation, hunger things that you don't really need to vary dramatically between a fox and a human being whereas the the outer more reasoning.
It's 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 her deal on described it as the human brain is essentially a monkey brain with a supercomputer placed on the outside 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 deeper brain.
And, and it's still unclear. What neocortex is doing in the case of frontal, cortex, as you mentioned earlier, it's clear that it's providing some quieting of impulses, some context setting, rule, setting context, switching, all of that makes good sense. But then, there are a lot of cortical areas that sure are involved in Vision or touch or hearing. But then there's also a lot of real estate that just feels unexplored, right? So I'm curious whether or not in your clinical,
Work or work with neural link or both whether or not you have ever encountered neurons. That do something that's really peculiar and intriguing. And here I'm referring to examples that could be anywhere in the brain. Yeah there you go. Wow. Like these neurons when I stimulate them or when they're taken away, we did something kind of bizarre but
interesting. Yeah, yeah, there's the one that comes immediately to mind.
Has unfortunately, in a terrible case, in kids that have a tumor in the hypothalamus, that lead to what we call gelastic seizures, which is sort of a 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. And so, you know, you don't normally think of
A deep structure in the brain like the hypothalamus as being involved in the, you know, a function like humor and and certainly when we think about this kind of laughter in the these kids with tumors, it's mirthless laughter is the kind of textbook phrase, humorless laughter. It's just a reflexive almost
Zombie-like behavior, and it 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 is, 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 but that's a neuronal function. That's you know thank goodness. Due to
Neurons properly wired and properly functioning and any neurons that do anything like this can be broken. And 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 Etc. One category Eula to earlier, which is pharmacology and
You specifically mentioned that the tremendous power that pharmacology holds right whether knots through psychedelics are through prescription drug or you know some other compound. The other approach are these little micro electrodes 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 quadriplegic 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 to just give us a bit Fuller picture of this. We're talking about a patient who can't move their
limbs because they've have spinal cord damage, right? The motor cortex that controls movement is in theory, fine, right? Make a small hole in the skull and through that. Whole a robot is going to place electrodes obviously motor cortex. But then where how is the idea that you're going to play a concert from different locations, are going to 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 understand how the signals are going to
Out of motor cortex past the lesion and into an out to the limbs because the lesion hasn't been dealt with it all in this scenario. So just to
clarify their 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 road map a few years. 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 across thetic hand and
arm, or just Mouse and keys on a mouse and
keys on a keyboard for starters. So you wouldn't see anything in the world move as they have an intention. The patient might imagine say, flexing their fists or moving their wrist and what would happen on the screen as 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, you know, select letters in sequence and they could type.
This is the easy place to start easy and quotes.
I would say because the transformation of electrical signals from motor cortex through the brain stem into the spinal cord and out to the muscles is somewhat known right through 100 years or more of incredible laboratory research, right? But the transformation meaning how to take the electrical signals out of motor cortex and put it into a mouse or a robot arm, that's not a trivial.
A problem. I mean, that there, that's a whole other set of problems. In fact,
well, we're we're taking. We're unloading some of that difficulty from from the brain itself, from the brain of the patient and putting some of that into software. So, we're using smarter 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, smoothie rewards and they do really well. We actually have the world record of bitrate of information, coming out of a monkey's brain to, you know, intelligently control a cursor on a screen. We're doing that better than anyone else. And, you know, again, thanks in no small part due to krsna's shenoy and his, you know, his lab and the people that have worked for him that have been helping neurolink. But what you can't do with that, monkey is ask.
I'm what what he's thinking, you can't ask
him, we could ask him but he won't get a very interesting answer.
You can't tell him to try something different. You can't tell him to hey, you know, try their shoulder on this early, try the other hand and see if there's some crossbody. Neuronal firing that gives you a useful signal. Once we get the people we expect to see what they've seen when they've done similar work in academic Labs, which is the human can work with you to vastly accelerated.
This process and get much more interesting results. So, one of the things out of out of Stanford recently is there was a lab that with Krishna, and Jamie Henderson and other people decode speech, out of the hand movement area in the brain. So, what we know is that there are, you know, multitudes of useful signals in each area of the brain that we've looked at so far, they just tend to be highly.
Rest for say, hand movement in the hand area. But that doesn't mean only hand movement in the hand
area. Okay, so here's the confidence test, there's a long history dating back really prior to the 1950s of scientists doing experiments on themselves. Sure. Not because they are Reckless, but because they want the exact source 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, they've studied or stimulated their own brain or done things to really try and get a sense of what the animals they work on or the patient's, they work on might be experiencing psychiatrist or sort of famous for this. By the way, I'm not pointing fingers at anybody but psychiatrist are known to try the drugs that they administer. And some people would probably imagine that's a good thing.
NG just so that the clinicians could have empathy for the sorts of side effects and not-so-great effects of some of these drugs that they administer to to patients, but the confidence test.
I present you is, would you be willing or are you willing if allowed to have these electrodes implanted into your motor cortex? Yeah, you're not a quadriplegic, right? You can move your limbs, yeah. But
Given the state of the technology at neural link. Now, would you do that or maybe in the next couple of years if you were allowed? Would you be willing to do that? Yeah. And be the person to say hey turn up the stimulation over there, I feel like I want to reach for the cup with that robotic arm, but I'm feeling kind of some resistance because it's exactly that kind of experiment done on a person who can move their limbs and who deeply understands the technology and the goals of the experiment that I would.
Are you actually stands to advance the technology fastest sure as opposed to putting the electrodes first into somebody who is impaired at a number of levels and then trying to think about why things aren't working right, right. And again, you know, this is all with the goal of reversing paralysis in mind. But would you implant yourself with these microelectrodes? Yeah,
absolutely. I would be excited to do that. I think for the first iteration of the device it probably wouldn't be very
Meaningful. It wouldn't be very useful because I can still move my limbs and our first outputs from this are things that I can do just as easily with my hands, right? Moving a mouse typing on a keyboard. We are necessarily making this device as a medical device for starters for people with bad medical problems and no good options. It wouldn't really make sense for an able-bodied person to get one in the near term. It as
The technology develops and we make devices specifically designed to perform functions that can't be done even by an able-bodied person. Say eventually refined the technique to get to the point where you can type faster with your mind and one of these devices, then you can with text to speech, 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 for me to, you know,
At 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 you know, the hundreds of surgeries that I personally done with this. I think it's much safer than many of the industry-standard FDA-approved surgeries that I routinely do on patients that, you know, are no one even thinks twice about their standard of care.
R neural link is already reached in my mind, 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 is the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand for those listening. Not watching. There's a looks like a small lump between dr. Macdougall's
Forefinger and thumb or index finger and thumb 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've always had it in the time that I've known you. What is that lump and why did you put it in there?
Yeah so it's a small writable RFID tag. What's an
RFID? What is RFID stand
for? Yeah, radio frequency identification and
And so it's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can temporarily power. If you approach an antenna, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth. So most phones have that capability of reading and writing to this chip for years. It let me into my house unlocked, the deadbolt on my front door, for some years, it unlocked, the doors of knurling
Let me through, you know, the the various lock doors inside the building, 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 crypto, I had a crypto private key written on it to store a cryptocurrency that I thought was, you know, a dead offshoot of one of the main crypto currencies after it forked. And so, I put the private wallet.
He on there and forgot about it, and remembered a few years later that it was there and went and checked. And it was worth, you know, a few thousand dollars more than when I had left it on there. So that was a nice finding change in the sofa and the 21st century.
And when you say you read it, you're essentially taking a phone or other device in scanning over the irf the, the lump in your hand so to speak, and then it can read the data from there. Yeah. So actually, yeah. What other sorts of things could one put into these RFID Zin?
Theory and how long can they stay in there before you need to take them out and Yeah, and recharge them or
replace them. Well, the these are passive, they're coated in biocompatible glass and as an extras, I'm a rock climber. And so, I was worried about that glass shattering during rock climbing. I additionally, coded them in another ring of silicone before implanting that, so it's pretty safe their 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 for any reason, you know, at some point but the technology is always improving so I might remove it and upgrade it, that's not inconceivable already. There's, you know, 10x more storage versions available that could be a drop-in replacement for this if I ever remove it. But you know that it has a small Niche, use case and it's an interesting proof of concept tiptoeing towards the concept that you mentioned.
You know, you have to be willing to go through the things that you're suggesting to your patients in order to, you know, say with a straight face that you think, this is a reasonable thing to do. So a small subcutaneous implant in the hand, it's a little different than a brain implant. But yeah,
what's involved in getting that RFID chip into the hand, is it? I'm assuming, it's an outpatient procedure, there's only you did it on
yourself? Yeah. Yeah. They're this was a kitchen table. Kind of procedure any anesthetic or
No, you know II, I've seen people do this with lidocaine injection, I for my money. I think a lidocaine injection is probably as painful as just doing the procedures,
the little cut in that thin skin on the top of the hand, right? Some people are cringing right now. Other people are saying I want one because you don't have to never worry about losing your keys. Yeah, or passwords, I actually really like him for passwords because I'm dreadfully bad at remembering passwords have to put them in places all over the place and then it's like I'm like that kid in.
Remember that movie Stand by me? Where the kid hides, the pennies under the porch and the Roses the map. Yeah, spends all summer trying to walk. I can relate. Yes, a little it's just a little slit and then put in there. No. Local. Immune response. No, no, no pasta, no swelling
materials are completely biocompatible there. On the surface exposed to the body. So no bad, reaction and healed up, you know? And days and it was fine.
Very cool since we're on video here. Maybe. Can you just maybe revisit and show us?
Yeah. So so we're you not to point out that little lump. I would have known to to ask about it but and any other members of your family have have
these a few years after having this and seeing the convenience of me being able to open the door without keys, my wife insisted that I put one in her as well. So she's walking around with one fantastic. We consider them are sort of our version of wedding rings,
love it. Well, it certainly more permanent than wedding rings in
In some sense, I can't help, but ask this question, even though it might seem a little bit off topic as long as we're talking about implantable devices and Bluetooth and RFID chips in the body, I get asked a lot about the safety or lack thereof of a Bluetooth headphones. You work on the brain, you're a brain surgeon. That's valuable real estate in there. And you understand about electromagnetic fields, and sure any discussion about EMS immediately puts us in the category of likely, get their tent.
Boil hats and yet, I've been researching Ems for a future episode of the podcast. Track and emfs are a real thing. That's not a valuable statement. Everything is a real thing at some level, even an idea but there does seem to be some evidence that electromagnetic fields of sufficient strength can alter the function of maybe the health of but the function of neural tissue given the neural tissue is electrically signaling among itself. So
I'll just ask this in a very straightforward way. Do you use Bluetooth headphones or wired headphones? Yeah, Bluetooth. And you're not worried about any kind of EMF Fields across the skull.
No, I mean, I think the energy levels involved are so tiny that, you know, ionizing radiation aside, we're way out of the realm of ionizing radiation that people would worry about, you know, tumor causing EMF Fields, even just the electromagnetic field
itself as is very well described in a Bluetooth frequency range. The power levels are tiny in these devices. And so, you know, we are Awash in these signals whether you use Bluetooth headphones or not for that matter. You're you're getting bombarded with ionizing radiation in a very tiny amount, no matter where you live on earth, unless you live under huge amounts of water, 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 electromagnetic fields that it's just, it's a, 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 earbuds any longer for a couple of reasons once as you know, I take a lot of supplements and I reached into my left pocket once and swallowed a handful of supplements that included a Bluetooth. A earpod pro. I knew it, I swallowed it, the moment after I gulped it down, by the way, folks, to please don't do this. It was not a good idea. It wasn't, it wasn't an idea, it was a mistake and but I could see it on my phone as registering, their never saw it again. So I'm assuming it's no longer my body. But anyway, there's a bad joke there.
Sure, but in any event, I tend to lose them to misplace them. So that's the main reason. But I did notice when I used them, that there's some heat generated there. I also not convinced that plugging your ears all day long as there's some ventilation through the, through the sinus systems that include the years. So it sounds to me like you're not concerned about the use of earbuds, but what about heat near the brain? I mean, there's the, the cochlea, the auditory mechanisms that
That's it pretty close to the surface. Their heat and neural. Tissue are not friends. Sure I'd much rather get my brain cold, then hot. Yeah, in terms of keeping the cells healthy and Alive. Should we be thinking about the heat effects of some of these devices or other things? Is there anything we're
overlooking? Well, I think about it this way. The I use cars as a Nana analogy, a lot and, you know, mostly internal combustion engine cards, so these analogies are going to start
B4 n and useless for another generation of people that grew up in the era of electric cars. But using cars as a platform to talk about fluid cooling systems, your body has a massive distributed fluid cooling system. Similar to a car's 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 away or cold away from any area of the body that's focused heating or focused cooling. So, you could put an ice cube on your skin until it completely melts away in. The blood is going to bring heat back to that area. You can put you can stand in the sun under much more scary heating Rays from the Sun itself that contain UV 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. You're talking to the guy that tells everybody get sudden light in their eyes every morning, but I don't want people to get burned or give themselves skin cancer. I encourage people to protect their skin accordingly and and different individuals require different levels of protection from the Sun. Sure. Some people do very well in a lot of sunshine never get basal cell or anything like that. Some people and it's not just people with very fair skinned, a minimum of sun, exposure can cause some issues. And here I'm talking 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, you know, for for a moment to compare it with Bluetooth headphones. Your body is very capable of carrying that heat away and dissipating it, you know, via sweat evaporation or you know, temperature Equalization. So any heat that's locally generated in that year. You know, one there's a pretty large bony barrier there. But to there's a ton of blood flow in the scalp and in the head, in general and
Only in the brain, that's going to regulate that temperature. So I think certainly there can be a tiny temperature variation but I doubt very seriously that it's enough to cause a significant problem
like to go back to Bringing augmentation, you've made very clear. That one of the first goals for neural link is to get quadriplegics walking again. And again, what a marvelous goal that is and I certainly hope you guys succeed. Well again, just just to be very clear.
Clear. The first step is
we we aren't reconnecting. The patient's own muscle system to their motor Court,
allowing them, excuse me, agency, over the movement of things in the world. Yes. And eventually their
body and you're exactly right? Yeah, eventually their body. We would we would love to do that and we've done a lot of work on developing a system for stimulating, the spinal cord 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?
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 motor cortex and send them to the spinal cord, which most of the wiring should be intact in the spinal cord below the level of say, the the injury caused by a car accident, a motorcycle, accident, or gunshot wound, or whatever, and it should be possible to reconnect the brain.
The body in that way. So, not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, in some small number of years, that neural link 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. The names that I learned about in my textbooks as a graduate student, we like georgopoulos, and that won't mean anything to anyone, unless you're a neuroscientist, but georgopoulos performance.
The first sophisticated recordings out of motor. Cortex, just simply asking, like, what sort of electrical patterns are present in motor cortex as an animal or human moves, a limb, Krishna shenoy being another major Pioneer, in this area and many others, right? And just really highlighting the fact that basic research, where 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 sorts of big clinical.
Additions that you all at neuro-linker
doing. Yeah it can't be said enough that you know we broadly speaking industry. Sometimes our and sometimes stand on the shoulders of academic Giants, they were the real Pioneers that they were involved in the grind for years in a nun. Glorious unglamorous way, no stock option. No some options and you know the reward for all that hard work is a paper at the end of the day.
That is read by, you know, dozens of people. And so you know they were selfless academic researchers that that made all this possible and we all humanity and knurling show them a massive debt of gratitude, for all the hard work that they've done and continue to
do. I agree. I'd like to just take a brief moment and thank one of our podcast sponsors which is inside tracker inside trackers, a personalized nutrition platform, the analyzes data from your blood and DNA,
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For.com huberman to get 20% off any of inside trackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker. Dot coms huberman to get 20% off along the lines of augmentation early on in some of the public discussions about neural link that I overheard between Ilan and areas podcast host cetera. 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 hippocampus that you. So,
Really have worn on your shirt today. So for those, a, the beautiful looks like either looks like a goal G or alcohol. Rendition of the hippocampus. Yeah, translates to see who our sentence area of the brain. That's involved in learning and memory and among other things. It was this idea thrown out that chip or chips could be implanted in the hippocampus that would allow greater than normal memory abilities. Perhaps, that's one idea. Sure. 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 and I could just sit here, look at e looking at each other or not nodding or shaking our heads and essentially hear each other's thoughts,
which sounds outrageous.
But of course, why not, why should we constrain ourselves to as our good friend Eddie Chang? And it was a neurosurgeon who was already on this podcast. Once before said speech is just the shaping of breath.
As it exits. Our lungs, right? Incredible. Really? When you think about it, but we don't necessarily need speech to hear and understand each other's thoughts because the neural signals that produce that shaping of the lungs. Come from some intention. The, you know, I have some idea although it might 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's thoughts? And and also how would we restrict what the other person could hear? Yeah,
well so absolutely. I mean, think about,
The fact that we could do this right now, if you pulled out your phone and started texting me on my phone and I look down and started texting you, we would be communicating without looking at each other or talking shifting that function from a phone to an implanted device. It requires no magic, Advanced no Leap Forward, its technology. We already know how to do if we say put a device in that allows you to control keyboard and a mouse, which is our state.
Good intention for our first human clinical trial
or Iran against deliberately interrupting or I can text an entire team of people. Sure simultaneously and they can text me. And in theory, I could have a bunch of thoughts and 5 10 50 people could hear, right? Or 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 of this, but it's not very difficult to.
To imagine the implementation of the same device in a more verbally focused area of the brain that allows you to more naturally, speak the thoughts that you're thinking and have me have them rendered into speech that I can hear you know, maybe via a bone conducting implant so silently here
or or not silently. Like I could let's say I was getting off the plane and I wanted to let somebody at home know that I had arrived. I might be able to think in my mind think their first
Name, which might queue up a device that would then play my voice to them and say, just got off the plane. I'm going to grab my bag and then I'll give you a call
right on their home, Alexa, right? So that's all possible. Meaning, we know the origin of the neural signals, right? It gives rise to speech. We know the different mechanical and neural apparatus. I like the cochlea ear drums. Etc. That
Transduce sound waves into electrical signals and essentially, all the pieces are known. We're just really talking about like refining it. Yeah, refining it. And reconfiguring it. It's, I mean, it's not an easy problem, but it's really an engineering problem rather than a
neuroscience problem. For that, for that use case, you know, for a nonverbal communication, you might say, that's a solved problem in a very crude disjointed way sir, some Labs have solved, you know.
Part 1 of it. Some Labs of salt, part 2 of it, there are products out there that solve, you know, say the implanted bone conduction part of it for the, for the deaf Community. There are, there are no implementations. I'm aware of their pulling all that together into one product. That's a streamlined package from end to end. I think that's a few years down the road,
and we have some hints of how easily or poorly people will adapt to these.
Um, it's called the novel Transformations. A few years ago, I was on Instagram and I saw a post from a woman. Her name is casar Jacobson. And she is deaf since birth and can sign. And to some extent can read lips, but she was discussing Neo sensory. So, this is a device that translates sound in the environment into touch Sensations on her hand or wrist, she's a
Admirer of birds and all things Avian. And I reached out to her about this device is very curious because this is a very interesting use case of neuroplasticity in the sensory domain which is a fascination of mine and she said that yes indeed it afforded her novel experiences. Now when walking past say pigeons in the park if they were to make some Google whatever sounds that down pigeons make that she would feel those sounds and
That indeed it is enriched her experience of those birds in ways that obviously it wouldn't otherwise I haven't followed up with her recently to find out whether or not ongoing use of Neo sensory has made for a better worse or kind of equivalent experience of avians in the world which for her is near-obsession. So she Delights in them. What are your thoughts about in a peripheral devices like that?
Periphery peripheral. Meaning outside of the skull, no requirement for a surgery. Do you think that there's a more immediate or even a just generally potent, use case for peripheral devices? And do you think that those are going to be used more readily before we kind of brain surgery? Requiring devices are
used. Yeah, certainly the barrier to entry is lower the barrier to adoption is low.
If you're making a tactile 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. What you know, again, there's no perfect measure of the efficacy of a device. One device compared to another especially across modalities. But one one way that you can start to compare apples to oranges is bitrate, you know, useful information in or out of the brain as
You know, 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 bitrate out? How much information are you able to usefully convey into the system and get out of the system into the body into the brain? And I think there's what we've seen in the early stabs at this is that there's a very low threshold for bitrate.
On some of the devices that are trying to avoid, you know, direct brain surgery.
Could you perhaps say what you just said? But in a way, that maybe people who aren't as familiar with thinking about bit rates, might might be able to digest their, I'm referring to myself and I understand bitrate understand that adding a new channel of information is just that adding information. Are you saying it's important to understand whether or not that new information?
Provides for novel
function or experience and to
and to what extent is that 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 a technology is one crude way to try to get it. That is is bitrate think of it as back in the days of dial-up modems. The
Rate of your modem was, you know, 56k or 96, I can still hear the sound of the dial-up in the background then completely. Yeah, that was a bit rate that thankfully kept 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?
Lee. And right now that that number is very small even compared to the old modems 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 the 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 knurling is that the ceiling is
Really high. There's no obvious reason that you can't interface with millions of neurons as this technology is refined and developed further. So that's the kind of wideband, you know, high-bandwidth brain interface that you want to develop if you're talking about and a semantic prosthetic and AI assistant to your cognitive abilities. You know, the more sci-fi things that we think about
the coming decades. So it's an important caveat when you're evaluating these Technologies, the really want it to be something that you can expand often to the Sci-Fi.
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 link 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, it's not a an electrode, it's not Neo sensory, right? None of that stuff. What it is is
Surely a stick that has an interface with a surface so it's swept back and forth across the ground and you're translating. What would otherwise be visual cues into somatic sensory cues sure and we know that blind people are very good at understanding even when they are approaching say a curb Edge because they are integrating that information from the tip of the cane up through their somatosensory cortex.
And their motor cortex with other things like the changes in the wind and sound as a round, a corner, and you're imagining a like a corner in San Francisco downtown ways you get to the corner. It's a completely different set of auditory cues.
And very often, we know and this because my laboratory worked on visual repair for a long time. I talk to a lot of blind people use different devices to navigate the world that they aren't aware of the fact that they're integrating these other cues but they nonetheless do them subconsciously, right? And in doing so get pretty good at navigating with a cane right now. Kane 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. The best that we know being a dog, a sighted dog. Sure. That can cue you again with stopping at a curbs Edge or even if there are some individuals that might seem a little sketchy. Dogs are also very good at sensing different arousal States and others threat danger. I mean they're Exquisite at it, right? So here what we're really talking about is taking a cane or a another biological system, essentially a whole nervous system and saying this other nervous systems
Job is to get you to navigate more safely through the world. Right in some sense. What neurolink is trying to do is that but with robotics to insert them and chips which raises the the question people can say, finally I question the question is this we hear about
BMI brain machine interface, which is really what knurling specializes in. We also hear about AI, another example, where there's great promise in great fear, right? We hear about machine learning as well. To what extent can these brain machine interfaces? Learn the same way. A seeing eye, dog 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, right? Put simply what is the role for AI and machine learning in the type of work that you're doing?
That's a great question. 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 your
Coupling it with another form of intelligence, a human intelligence and you're allowing the to to learn each other. So undoubtedly the human that has inner length, device will get better at using it over time. Undoubtedly the software that the neural link Engineers have written will adapt to the firing patterns that that device is able to record and overtime focus in on meaningful.
Knowles toward movement, right? So if a neuron is firing a high firing rate, when you intend to move the mouse cursor up and to 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 correlating it 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, 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 correlating the activity that you record when they're moving toward an up and right, Target on a screen with that, firing pattern, and similarly, for up and left down in, left down and write. And so, 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 mouse, 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, very difficult problem. But a human brain is good enough with the aid of software to solve that problem and map well enough to a semi stable 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 to it, the next day and some of the signals have
shifted. You're describing this, I'm recalling. A recent experience. I got one of these rowers, you know, for to exercise and I am well aware that there's a proper row stroke and there's a improper row struck and most everybody including me who's never been coached in rowing gets on this thing and pushes with their legs and pulls with their arms and back and it
Some mix of Incorrect and maybe a smidgen of correct type execution. There's a function within the row or that allows you this gets me to play a game where you can actually every row stroke. You generate arrows toward a dartboard and it knows whether or not you're generating the appropriate forces at the given segment of the row. The initial poll when you're leaning back Etc and adjust the trajectory of the arrows so that when you do a proper row, stroke it gets closer.
To a bull's-eye and it's a very satisfying because you now have a visual feedback that's unrelated to this, the kinds of instructions that one would expect like, oh, you know, hinge your hip a bit more or, you know, splay, your knees a bit more reach, more with your arms or pull first with your back. All the rowers are probably cringing as I say this because they're realizing the, what is exactly the point which is, I don't know how to row, but over time simply by paying attention to whether or not the arrow is hitting the bullseye or not more or less frequently you can improve your row stroke and get
As I understand, pretty close to Optimal row. Stroke in the same way that if you had a coach there telling you, hey, do this and do that. What we're really talking about here is neuro biofeedback sure. So is that an analogy similar to what you're describing and
that's a great analogy, you know, humans are 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 controlling these things. In fact, it's
It's the default on the obvious way to do it. Is to have people and monkeys play video games. Do you play video
games? Yeah, sure. Which video games.
Let's see. I play old ones. I'm a little nostalgic. So I like the old Blizzard game Starcraft and Warcraft. Oh my God, I don't even know
those. I remember the first Apple computers. I mean, I how old are you 43? Okay,
45, or now, as a few days ago,
happy birthday. So we're a little bit offset there.
I can recall, Mike Tyson's, Punch-Out like the original Nintendo game. Super
Mario Brothers, and I can hard here,
but the game sort of games you're describing. I don't recall that my understanding is that the newer games are far more sophisticated in some respects. I did
recently find time to play cyberpunk which was really satisfying and may be appropriate. It's a game where the characters are all fully modded out with cybernetic implants little perfect but you know, they
The root of the game is run around and shoot things, so maybe not so different from, you know, duck hunt or whatever. From our
childhoods reason I asked about video games is there's been some controversy as to whether or not they are making young brains better or worse. And I think some of the work from Madame Gazelle, he's Lab at UCSF, and other Laboratories have shown that actually provided. That children in particular and adults are also spending time in normal face-to-face. Let's call them more traditional face-to-face. Interactions that
Games can actually make nervous systems that is people a much more proficient at learning and motor execution. Sure visual detection and on and on.
Yeah, there's some work showing that surgeons are better if they play video games. So, I try to squeeze some in as a, you know, a professional development activity. Great
great. Well, I'm sure you're getting cheers from the from those that like, video games out there. And some of the parents were trying to get their kids to play with fewer video games or cringing, but that's okay, we'll let them.
Them settle their familial 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. And I want to highlight this because I think it's quite unusual for a company to do this. I'm probably in earn a few enemies. By saying this, despite the fact that I've always owned Apple devices and from the South Bay, you know, the apple design team is notoriously cryptic about what they're going to do next to her. When the next phone or computer is going to
Out is is vaulted to Serious extent. Neural link has been pretty open about their goals, right? With the understanding, the goals change and have to change. And one of the things that they've done, which I think is marvelous, is, they've held online symposia, where you, and other colleagues of mine from the Neuroscience Community, Dan Adams, who have tremendous respect for and Elon and others, their neural link.
Have shared some of the progress that they've made in experimental animals. I'm highlighting this because I think if one takes a step back, I mean, just for most people to know about and realize that there's experimentation on animals implantation of electrodes. And so, on is itself, a pretty bold move because that understandably evoke some strong emotions in people, and in some people live oaks extremely strong emotions, sure, neural link did.
In such Symposium where they showed implant devices in pigs, right? Then they did another one you guys did another one where it was implant devices in monkeys, right? I assume at some point, there will be one of these public symposia where the implant devices will be in a human. What was the rationale for using pigs? I'm told pigs are very nice creatures. Yeah, I'm told that they are quite smart, right? And
For all my years as a neuroscientist and having worked. Admittedly on every species from mice. To cuttlefish two humans, two hamsters to, you know, I confess various carnivore 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. Sure why work on pigs?
Yeah. Well, let me let me say first
First neurolink is almost entirely composed of animal loving people. The people at neurolink are obsessive animal lovers. There are signs up all around the office, you know, spontaneously put up by people within the organization, you know, 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.
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, and I do want to highlight this, that the FDA and the other governing bodies 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 speciesism right in in most humans. Not all some people truly see, equivalence between a lizard and a human lizard life being equipment human life. Most human beings I think in particular
human beings who
themselves or who have loved ones that are suffering from diseases, that they hope could be cured at some point view themselves as species and feel that if you have to work
Biological system in order to solve the problem, working on non-human animals. First makes sense, to most people. Sure, but certainly, there's a category of people that feels very strongly in the opposite
direction. Sure. And you know, I think we would probably be having a very different conversation around animal research. If we weren't, you know, we as a species, we as a culture weren't just casually slaughtering millions of animals to eat them.
Every single day. And so that is a background against which that the relatively minuscule number of animals used in research. 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 end their lives are done for
food or for fur or faux fur or
These are the reasons that people, you know, have historically used animals. So we in that context, we do animal research because we have to there's no other way around it. If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said, okay, you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option. I think there would be a lot of people that would step up and say yes I'm willing to participate in early stage clinical research. You already volunteered? Yeah.
And I wouldn't be alone and that you know, as a potential way that animals could maybe be spared being unwilling participants in this on that note to whatever extent possible. I think knurling goes really, really far, much, much farther than anyone I've ever heard of any organization I've ever heard of anything. I've ever seen, to give the animals agency in every aspect of the research we have,
Just an incredible team 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 is ever compelled to participate in experiments beyond the surgery itself. So if say, on a given day are our star, monkey pager, doesn't want to play video games for Smoothie, no one forces them to ever?
This is a very important point and I want to queue
Well to really what Matt is saying here. Obviously the animals are being researched on for neural link so they don't get to opt-in to opt out of the experiment. Right? But what he's saying is that they play these games during which neural signals are measured from the brain, because they have electrodes implanted 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 in Laboratories around the world. Where people experiment on mice monkeys, some cases pigs or other species in which the typical Arrangement is to water deprived. The animals, we never do that and then have the animals work for their daily ration of water, right? And some people are hearing this and probably thinking wow that's barbaric. And here I'm not trying to point fingers at the people doing that kind of work.
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, right? Depriving them of something that they yearn 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 rations. But there's there's never any deprivation. There's never any adverse negative stimuli that push.
Is
them to do anything.
Must say, I'm impressed by that decision. Because training animals to do tasks in laboratory settings is very hard, and the reason so many researchers have defaulted to water deprivation, and at 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 than having to wait around and try and figure out.
Out why their monkey isn't working that day. In fact, having known a number of people who've done these kinds of experiments who never done them in my lab. My monkey isn't working. Today is a common grave among graduate students. And postdocs who do this kind of work and for people who work on mice. Okay? So this is very important information to get across and there's no public relations statement woven into. This is just we're talking about the nature of the research, but I think it
Important that people are aware of this.
Yeah, it's one of the one of the underappreciated Innovations out of neural link is how far the Animal Care team has been able to move in the direction of Humane treatment of these
guys? Wonderful. What 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, you know, in the cardiac area their hearts are, you know, somewhat similar to human hearts, how
big?
Are these pigs? I've seen Little Pigs.
I've seen big pics. Yeah, there's a range. There's a bunch of different varieties of pig. There's a bunch of different species that, you know, you can optimize for different characteristics. There's many pigs. There's, you know, York sure's. There's a lot of different kind of pigs that we use in different contexts when we're trying to optimize a certain characteristic. So yeah, the pigs are we don't necessarily need them to be smart or
Performers. Although occasionally we have, you know, trained them to walk on a treadmill. When we're studying how their limbs move for some of our spinal cord research but we're not, you know, recording interesting. Say, cognitive data out of their minds, they're really just a biological platform with a skull that's close enough in size and shape to humans to be a valid platform to study the safety of the device,
unlike a monkey, or a human.
Pig. I don't think can reach out and hit it right button or a lever. Exact, how are they signaling that they saw or sent to something? Yeah. So, again,
the pigs are really just a safety platform to say the device is safe to implant. It doesn't, you know, breakdown or cause any kind of toxic reaction. The monkeys are where we are really doing our 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 monkeys first.
Let's talk about the skull. Yeah years ago you and I were enjoying a conversation about these very sorts of things that were discussing today and he said, you know, the skull is actually a pretty lousy biological adaptation. Far better would be a titanium plate, You Know, spoken, like a true neurosurgeon with a radio receiver implanted in his hand but in all seriousness,
Drilling through the skull with a 2 millimeter hole. Certainly don't do this at Home, Folks. Please don't do this. But that, yes, that's a small entry site, but I think most people cringe, when they hear about that or think about that. Sure. 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 and a titanium plate, will be better. And 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 skull is very good at what it does. Given the tools that we are working with as biological organisms that develop in our mother's uterus, the skull is, you know, usually the appropriate size. It's one of the hardest things in your body. That said, there are a couple puzzling vulnerabilities. Some of the thinnest bone in the skull is in the temporal region. This is
Neurosurgeons will 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 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're struck there and the sharp edges of that fractured bone, very often cut
An artery called the middle meningeal artery that leads to a big blood clot that crushes. The brain is how a lot of people with you know what otherwise would be a relatively minor injury and up dying, is this large blood clot, developing from high-pressured, arterial blood, that crushes, the the brain. 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 and, you know, the design of a human skull. Otherwise, you 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 arise from development. It's not that bad, really, one of the interesting features in terms of shock absorption, the hopefully prevents a lot of traumatic brain injury is the
Fluid sheath around the brain. The brain you may know is it's mostly fat. It floats in salt water, in our brains, our brains are all floating in salt water. And so with rapid acceleration, deceleration that sheath of saltwater adds a marvelous protective cushion against development of, you know, bruising of the brain, say or bleeding in the brain. And so I think for
Flaws in the design that do exist. You can imagine things being a lot worse and there's probably a lot fewer tbis than would exist. If a human designer was taken a first crack at
it. As you describe the thinness of this temporal bone and the and the presence of critical artery just beneath it. I'm thinking about most helmets and here I also want to queue up the fact that well whenever we hear about,
Out TBI or CTE or brain injury? People always think football hockey. But most traumatic brain injuries are things like car accidents or construction work, right? And it's not football and hockey that for some reason, football and hockey and boxing, get all the attention. But my colleagues that work on traumatic, brain injury told me that most of the traumatic brain injury. They see somebody slips it a party and hits their head or, you know, was in a car accident or
And Monumental accidents of various kinds.
To my mind. Most helmets don't actually cover this region close to the eyes. So is there is there also a failure of helmet engineering that you know, I can understand why you'd want to have your peripheral vision out the sides of your eyes, periphery of your eyes, but it seems to me if this is such critical real estate. Why isn't it being better protected?
You know, I'm no expert in helmets but I don't think we see a lot of epidural hematomas in sports injuries to
At this kind of injury usually need a really focal blunt. Trauma like a the baseball bat to the head is a classic mechanism of injury that would lead to a temporal bone fracture and epidural hematoma with sports injuries, you know, you don't often see that especially in football with, you know, a sharp sharper object coming in contact with the head, it's usually another helmet, right? Is the, the mechanism of injury
Hurry. So I can't think off the top of my head of an instance of this exact injury type in sports.
You spent a lot of time poking around in brains of humans and while 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 I think generally People's Health. When you look out on the landscape of things that people,
Can do and shouldn't do. If their desire is to keep their brain healthy, do any any data, or any particular practices come to mind, and I think we've all heard the obvious one. Don't don't get a head injury. If you do get a head injury, make sure it gets treated and don't get a second head injury, right. But those are sort of, duh type answers that I'm able to give some curious about the answers that perhaps I'm not able to give. Yeah, well, you
know, the obvious ones are. It's one that you you talk about
A lot and I see a lot of the the smoldering wreckage of humanity, you know, in the operating room and in the emergency room for people that come in, you know I work my practices in San Francisco, right next to the tenderloin. And so a lot of people that end up coming in, from the tenderloin of been drinking just spectacular amounts of alcohol for a long time and their brains are, you know, very often on the scans. They look like small walnuts inside there.
Empty skull, there's so much atrophy that happens with an alcohol soaked, brain chronically that I would say that's you know, Far and Away the most common source of brain damage that many of us just volunteer for and it's you know, when you look at them morbidity, kind of the human harm in aggregate. That's done, it's mystifying that that it's not something that we are all paranoid
about work.
People think that I don't drink at all. I'll occasionally have a drink. I could take it or leave it. Frankly, if all the alcohol in the plant disappeared, I wouldn't notice. But I do. Occasionally have a drink, maybe one per year, or something like that, but I am shocked at this. Current state of affairs, around alcohol, consumption, and advertising Etc. When I look at the data mainly out of the UK 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 gray matter. Cortex you go from one to two more thinning, you can from two to
three and there's a near linear
relationship between the amount that people are drinking in the amount of brain atrophy and to me it's like it's just sort of obvious from the these large-scale studies that as you point out alcohol atrophies the brain. Yeah it kills neurons, right? And I don't have any bias against alcohol or people that drink. I know many of them but it does seem to meet kind of shocking.
Um, that we're talking about, you know, the Resveratrol and red wine, which is at, you know, infant tests only small amounts and I'm clear Resveratrol is good for us. Anyway, by the way, matter of debate, I should point out but so alcohol, certainly alcohol and excess is bad for the brain. Sure. In terms of, okay, so we have had hits, bad alcohol, bad, you're working. As you mentioned your, the tenderloin is there any awareness that amphetamine?
Use can can
disrupt brain structure or function, you know, that's not an area that I spent a lot of time researching and I, you know, I incidentally, take care of people that have used every substance known to man and quantities that are, you know, spectacular, but I haven't specifically done research in that area. I'm not super well versed on the literature I
asked in part because maybe, you know, a colleague or will come across a colleague, who's working on this. As there's just such a
incredible increase in the use of things, like, Adderall Ritalin, modafinil are modafinil, which I think in small amounts in clinical. Clinically, prescribed situations can be very beneficial, but let's be honest. Many people are using these on a chronic basis and I don't think we really know what it does to the brain aside from increasing addiction for those substances. That's very clear. Well, for better or worse for generating a massive data set right now.
Well-put.
I'd like to briefly go back to our earlier discussion about neuroplasticity. If you made an interesting statement, which is that we are not aware of any single brain area that one can stimulate in order to invoke plasticity, right? This malleability of neural architecture years ago, Mike marisnick. And colleagues at UCSF did some experiments where they stimulate nucleus by Solace and paired that stimulation with 8 khz tone or in.
Um, cases, they could also stimulate a different brain area. The ventral tegmental area which causes release of dopamine and pair it with a tone and in it seemed in every one of these cases, they observed, massive plasticity. Now I look at those data and I compared them to the kind of classic data. I think it was Karl Lashley that did these experiments where they were taking animals and they scoop out a little bit of Cortex, put the animal back into a learning environment and the animal do pretty well.
If not perfectly sure, they asked about a different region of Cortex in a different animal and by the end of maybe 34 years of these kinds of lesion experiments, they referred to the equipotential of the cortex, meaning, they concluded that it didn't matter, which piece of the cortex you took out that there was no one critical area. So, on the one hand, you've got these experiments that say, you know, you don't really need a lot of the brain, right? And indeed every once in a while, a new story will come out where they'll patient person,
We'll go in for a brain, scan for some other reason, or an experiment, and the person seems perfectly normal and they like missing half their cortex, right? And then, on the other hand, you know, these experiments like the stimulation of Masala, serve ETA where you massive plasticity from stimulation of one area. I was I've never been able to reconcile these kinds of discrepant findings, and so I'd really like to just your opinion on this, you know, what is it about? The brain as an organ. That lets it be both so critical at the level of individual neurons and circuits so so,
Critical and yet at the same time it's able to circumvent these what would otherwise seem like, massive lesions and holes in itself.
Yeah, I mean a lot of a lot of it to reconcile does experiments you first account for the fact that they're probably in different species. Right? You take out particular portion of a pig or a rabbit grain. A small amount, you might not see a difference, but a small portion of the human brain say the part
Art most interested in coordinating speech or finger movement, and you're going to see profound losses or visual cortex, right? I take out a small portion of V1 and you'll have a visual deficit and so species matters, age matters, if you take out half of the brain in a very young baby that baby has a greasy, Anibal chance of developing high, high degree of function, by having the remaining,
Subsume, some of the functions lost on the other side, because they're very, very young and their brain is still developing. Its to some degree, a blank slate with extremely high plasticity over many years so that can overcome a lot of deficits 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
Say cerebellar and spinal circuits in other animals that generate stereotyped Behavior patterns and might not need the brain at all to perform say a walking movement or some other sequences of motor activities. So a lot of that depends on the experimental setup. I would say, in general, adult humans are very vulnerable to losing small parts of their brains and losing discrete functions.
I'm going to take the liberty of asking a question that merges across neural link and Tesla.
I could imagine that.
Cars whether or not they're on autopilot mode or being driven by the human directly and Society generally would benefit from knowing whether or not a human is very alert or sleepy. Sure I don't own a Tesla, perhaps this technology already exists but is there any idea that a simple sensor maybe even know just eyelid 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 less alert, 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, it's a credible of accidents between vehicles and then, of course, some percentage 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
scenario. Yeah, you know, I have no, you know, special insight into how Tesla software works. I know they have brilliant engineers.
When I have a Tesla 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 does it do that? And what voice does it use?
There's a small camera up by the rearview mirror and I think it's a simple. I track my guess here is that it's a simple eye tracking program and so it may already be the case that it's 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 and I've seen forms on the internet where people tape over that small camera
so they so they can Vols good. That's,
you know, I think they're definitely making efforts to try to try to save lives here.
Incredible. It's a incredible just because I think I'm fortunate enough to live in a lifetime where there were, there were no electric cars when I was growing up and now things are moving. Oh, so fast. No pun intended, what is your wish for brain machine interface and Rain augmentation? So let's let's assume that the clinical stuff can be worked out or maybe you have a pet clinical condition that you just are just yearning to see.
Solved and that would be fine too. But in addition to that way that you really just expand out, let's say we can extend your life 200 years or more 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? Yeah, with brain augmentation and brain machine interface and here please feel no bias whatsoever to answer in a way that reveals to us. You're you're
Ball empathy and consideration of clinical conditions because that's how you spend your days is fixing patients, and helping their lives be better. So if it lands in that category great but for sake of fun and for sake of delight and for sake of really getting us the audience to understand what's really possible here. Please feel no shackles. Yeah.
Well you know, I
I love the idea down the road and we're talking, you know, a 10-year maybe 20 year, time frame of humans just getting control over some of the horrible ways that their brains go wrong, right? So I think everybody at this point, has either known someone or second-order known someone, a friend of a friend who has been touched by addiction or depression suicide obesity these functions.
Of the brain or malfunctions of the brain or what drives me. These are the things that I want to tackle in my career you know in terms of my kid's life time, I'm thinking you know full human expansion of human cognition into AI full immersion in the internet of your cognitive abilities. Having no limitation for what you think.
As bottlenecked by needing to read the Wikipedia article, first to have the data to inform your thoughts, having communication with anyone that you want to unrestricted by this, you know, flapping are past meet 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 bottleneck of communication where
We'll try to send messages back and forth through a tiny straw and there's no reason that needs to necessarily be true. It's the way things have always been but it isn't the way things are going to be in the future. And I think there's a you know, a million, very sci-fi possibilities. In terms of banding human Minds together to be even more potent as a multi-unit organism.
No as an opt-in multi brain you know these are things that are so far down the road, I can't even directly see how they would be a mum implemented. But the technology we're 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 neural link website. And look at the jobs. We've got, we need the brightest people on the planet, working on these, the hardest problems in the world in my opinion. And so if you want to work on this stuff, come help us.
I have several responses 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? It was just said, neural link. And I said if you're interested, give us your email. So I put my email there, I got no response so the they made a wise choice in terrible hair jacked it 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 exploration so we can talk about some other time as well as I'm learning from you as you pass through your time at Stanford, but have arrived there at neural link and and I'll say that they're very lucky to have you. And folks, like Dan Adams who have known for
Very long time. So phenomenal neurosurgeons like yourself neuro, scientists 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 spear 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.
Take. Yeah, especially given the nature of the work,
but well, that's classic Elon, right? He doesn't keep secrets in public to commonly. He tells you what he's going to do and then he does it and people are always amazed by that you know 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's some subterfuge, a the that he is misdirecting but it's it's right out there in the open and I think knurling follows in that path of you know, we want people to know what we're doing.
And we want the brightest 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 quadriplegia to, you know, visit our patient registry and sign up to be considered for clinical trials, that will happen in the
future. We'll put a link to that, by the way. So maybe just the direct call could happen now. So you, this is for people who are quadriplegic, or who know people who are quadriplegic, we're in
Dressed in 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 get their final permission to proceed with the trial.
Great. So, please see the note in the show notes, the link, scuse me in the, in the show notes captions for that. Yeah, I want to thank you guys for your stance being public facing and also doing the incredibly hard work. I also think the robotics aspect, which you've
If
I'd for me today is extremely forward-thinking, and absolutely critical. So, a lot of it, critical engineering that no doubt will Wick out into other domains of neurosurgery and medical technology. Not just serving neural, links Mission directly. And I really want to thank you first of all, for coming here today and taking time out of your important schedule of seeing patients and doing brain surgery, literally happy. I do it time away from your family and time away from your mission.
Neural link briefly to share with people what you guys are doing. As I mentioned before, there's a lot of Mystique around in and even despite the fact that neural link is gone out of their way to try and erase some of that. Mystique, this to me is the clearest picture ever to my knowledge, that has been given about what's going on there and the, the stated and the real Mission and what's going on at the level of nuts and bolts and guts and brains. And this kind of thing. And I really just
Thank you also 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 implanted in your hand you don't just do this for a job. You live and breathe, and embody, 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 and breathe it. And I know your deep love for it. So I want to thank you for not just the brains that you put into it.
It and the energy you put into it, but also for 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 dr. Matthew
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