Elon Musk is overreacting to the brain chip for the blind
Elon Musk claims that a new brain chip from his company Neuralink will surpass human vision. US scientists review this and conclude that the claim is "at best unrealistic".
Elon Musk's startup Neuralink is undoubtedly an impressive company, making remarkable progress in brain implants. Its latest project, "Blindsight", is a chip designed to enable blind people to see. Musk claims on X that the chip will even surpass human vision. However, researchers at the University of Washington find this claim not only exaggerated but also dangerous. They write that the statement is "at best unrealistic".
The scientists created a study, published in Scientific Reports, that simulated what a person might see if they had a chip with 45,000 electrodes implanted in the visual cortex of the brain, processing the information received from the eye. For comparison, the implant that Neuralink installed in a paralyzed patient earlier this year had 1024 electrodes.
Electrodes are not pixels
A simulation shows that a video of a cat with a resolution of 45,000 pixels is crystal clear, but the virtual patient sees only a blurred image where the animal is barely recognizable. This is because Musk's prediction is based on the flawed assumption that an implant with millions of tiny electrodes in the visual cortex would lead to high-resolution vision, explains Ione Fine. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the lead author of the study.
"Engineers often think that electrodes generate pixels," says Fine, "but biology just doesn't work that way. We hope that our simulations based on a simple model of the visual system can provide insight into how these implants will function. These simulations differ greatly from the intuition that an engineer has when thinking in terms of pixels on a computer screen."
On a display, pixels are tiny points, but a brain works completely differently. In the visual cortex, each neuron informs the brain about images in a small area of the visual field, called the "receptive field". The receptive fields of neurons overlap. This means that a single light point stimulates a complex pool of neurons. Therefore, the screen resolution is not determined by the size or number of individual electrodes, but by how the information from thousands of neurons in the brain is interpreted.
The code is missing
Neuralink is making important technical progress, but the big challenge is to create a neural code. "Even to achieve typical human vision, one would not only have to aim an electrode at each cell in the visual cortex, but also stimulate it with the corresponding code," says Fine. "This is incredibly complex because each individual cell has its own code. You can't stimulate 44,000 cells of a blind person and say: 'Draw what you see when I stimulate this cell.' It would literally take years to record each individual cell."
So far, this code is not known, says the scientist. Perhaps one day someone will decipher it, or a way will be found for users of an implant to learn to adapt to a "false code". However, there are currently no signs of this.
"Musk's statement is dangerous"
The models developed for the study could be utilized by researchers and companies to optimally employ existing implants or develop new technologies, Fine says. However, she considers Elon Musk's statement that the brain chip will function better than human vision to be dangerous, as it could give false hope to those affected.
"Many people only become blind late in life," explains the psychology professor. "When you're 70 years old, it's very challenging to learn the new skills needed to navigate life as a blind person. Many become depressed. The desire to regain eyesight can be desperate."
The study conducted by the University of Washington highlights the complexity of deciphering the neural code required to achieve high-resolution vision with brain implants, as each individual cell has its unique code. Elon Musk's claim that Neuralink's chip will surpass human vision might give false hope to the blind community, as it could be considered dangerous and unrealistic based on current scientific understanding.
