Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk, is moving forward in the brain implant race. In addition to connecting machines to patients’ brains, Musk announced a major breakthrough in his project to restore vision to blind people through BlindsightNeuralink competes with other long-running projects such as Synchron, which recently got an ALS patient to use his mind to control Amazon’s Alexa.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has awarded Blindsight the Innovation Seal. The experimental device “will allow us to see even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve“, Musk said in a message on his social network X.
Blindsight is the second implantable product the company is developing after Telepathy. The latter is the implant Neuralink has so far given to two patients, with the aim of giving them the ability to control machines with their minds. Although the first attempt suffered complications after surgery, the second patient, who suffered from a spinal cord injury, put the technology to the test. play video games and learn how to design 3D objects.
–Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024
The FDA grants the Innovation Mark to medical devices that treat or diagnose life-threatening conditions. The purpose of this mark is accelerate the development and revision of these prototypes which are currently in development.
While there isn’t much information about Blindsight yet, the implants the company is showing off consist of a chip that processes and transmits neural signals that could be transmitted to devices like a computer or phone. “If the visual cortex is intact, it will allow even those who are blind from birth to see for the first time,” Musk continues in his X profile. “To set expectations correctly, the vision will initially be low-resolution, like Atari graphics, but over time it will have the potential to be better than natural vision and allow you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge“.
These qualities that Musk compares to those of the character of the science fiction series Stark Trek, if they become reality, will be a long-term possibility. In the development of this chip a trial phase with several patients is necessary to evaluate its device in a study that is expected to take several years, according to details in the U.S. government’s clinical trials database, reports Reuters.
In its announcement, Neuralink encourages those interested in trying the technology to sign up for its patient program, but for now its website is only looking for people with quadriplegia to try telepathy. The FDA still needs to approve Blindsight for human testing, as it did with the company’s other implant earlier this year.
