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Comment by hcineb | Hacker News Reader

I did not really say that any of this is routine. Nor did I try to be particularly convincing.

But implantation of ultra flexible and thin electrodes is not new (and it is promising, sure), several groups have been working on « mesh electrodes ». As of now it has not really proved safe enough for chronic use in humans.

The subdermal aspect is also certainly a nice advance, but relatively useless in a lab setting (and impossible in rodents).

The robotization is not really impressive, all electrophysiological apparati are robotized, for obvious reasons: nobody can reproducibly place electrodes with micrometer precision by hand.

But hey, let’s wait for some papers to be out and we’ll judge then.

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Ok so I looked it up and it appears that this concept of very thin and light electrodes is basically taking off right now with multiple implementations. In this context, Neuralink is basically competing against other products for a share of the neuro-implant market, which will be big at some point. Why doesn’t your comment mention any of this? Or the relative merits of each competitor? It’s not clear that neuralink was the first or the last to do any of this. Why should their effort to find an electrode material that prevents loss of signal be minimized? Shouldn’t they be encouraged to find a solution like the other people trying to find a solution in academia?

And I know you won’t answer this because nobody ever answers questions that aren’t inflammatory or insulting... but how could information not be encoded in the brain? When you dream, your brain could not possibly be generating the raw sensory signals... the only way to explain lucid dreams is heavy encoding of information and a really powerful guessing system to fill in gaps where signal decoding was weak or didn’t happen.

Sorry if I did not make that clear but I fully agree that their endeavor towards better electrodes should be encouraged, and maybe even saluted when they provide evidence of improvement over the state of the art.

The question of information in the brain, including whether it is encoded is a really hard one. Of course we can easily find some areas of the brain whose response is _correlated_ with aspects of the outside world. But what does it mean? Who (or what) is decoding it, why? Many different metaphora and analogies can be (and are) readily applied to the brain. As of now, it is safe to say that a comprehensive theory of neural processing has not really been able to answer all of these questions. It’s just all very complex.

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