Solve ailments like memory loss, hearing loss, depression and insomnia. Improve the bandwidth of human communication. These are some goals billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and his four-year-old company ‘Neuralink’ have set for their newly introduced electronic brain-computer interface. 

     About a month ago, Musk introduced something that looks like it came out of a sci-fi movie: a coin-sized chip that had been implanted in a pig brain. Musk presented what he defined as the “three little pigs demo.” The pig, with a Neuralink implant in the part of its brain that controls the snout, began eating and sniffing straw, which triggered spikes on a graph tracking the animal’s neural activity. Musk also revealed a pig who previously had an implant, proving that the modified pigs were indistinguishable from normal pigs. 

    The goal for Neuralink does not end there. Musk has bigger plans of supercharging human communication, as he said in an interview with The New York Times. 

   “We’re a 300 baud modem. Very slowly outputting information into our phone or maybe a little bit faster into a computer if you’re using 10 fingers,” he said on the Times’ “Sway” podcast. “And it’s just very hard to communicate. AI will diverge from us just because it can’t talk to us.”

    But before Musk’s plans of “improving human bandwidth of communication” can take place, Neuralink is being designed for a different purpose. Musk plans for his chip to resolve issues with eyesight and hearing, restore limb function and help with diseases like Parkinson’s. At the Neuralink presentation, Musk noted numerous different conditions that Neuralink is currently focused on, including memory loss, blindness and paralysis.

     Neuralink has received $158 million in funding, $100 million of which came from Musk, employs about 100 people and is growing. Before these unearthly ideas become reality, there is still much more work to be done, but many neuroscientists are excited about the possibilities the chip provides. Ralph Adolphs, Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at California Institute of Technology, tells Inverse Neuralink is “tremendously exciting” and “a huge technical achievement.” 

    There are still years of work ahead to fully achieve the goal of Neuralink. Scientists need to learn more about the brain and how it functions for those ideas to become a reality, but if the goal is achieved it will help millions of people overcome ailments and will be revolutionary in the world of science.