Member-only story
How Elon Musk’s Neuralink Will Read Your Mind
Science has come a long way since I first held a brain in my hand
When you hold a human brain in your hands, it doesn’t feel how you’d expect.
Most people think of something soft and mushy, like a stress ball or a Jell-O mold. But pulled from a jar of formaldehyde, the brain is much denser and less yielding — it’s like holding a wad of suet.
For cognitive science (neuroscience) majors at Johns Hopkins University in the early 2000s, Brain Day was a right of passage. After spending three years of our lives studying the organ in extreme detail — through all-night sessions in the libraries, crushingly difficult exams, and intense lectures — it was our first opportunity to actually pick one up and hold a brain in our hands.
Our professors arrived with jars containing all kinds of brains — young ones, old ones, normal ones, diseased ones. The air had the sickening, sweet smell of industrial-strength preservatives.
One student fainted. We joked that if he fell and hit his head, he couldn’t have chosen a better place to do it than in the lecture hall of Michael McCloskey, one of the nation’s foremost cognitive neuropsychologists. (He was fine.)
Even after studying the brain for years, though, there was still an element of opaqueness about the organ. We could observe how the brain worked at myriad levels, understand how broad levels of activity in certain regions affected perception, and even see its deformities and lesions physically laid out in front of us. But the idea that consciousness and thoughts could be scientifically tractable in our lifetimes was alien. Even standing among the world’s leading experts — and holding a brain in our hands — the organ’s inner workings seemed mysterious and unknowable.
With the growth of deep learning, compressive sensing, and neural prosthetics, all this is poised to change. And at the forefront of this change is a mysterious, secretive company run by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk: Neuralink.
Neuralink launched in 2016 and is based in San Francisco. It has raised $158 million to date, including at least $100 million from Musk.
