Neuralink Prime Study Progress Update – User Experience

This is highly concerning

notably he said this... "Dr. Rapaport continued to explain on the podcast that this method has one big drawback. It causes “some amount of brain damage when they’re inserted to the brain.” That, of course, is less than ideal. And Rapaport says he believed it was possible, “to extract information-rich data from the brain without damaging the brain.”

Yes

Yes Yes

Neuralink is putting the cart before the horse: none of what they are doing here are the true challenges of neural interfaces, which are:

-either neurons move away from the stress caused by the probes

-or neurons are killed by the probes.

The lifetime of neural probes due to this problem is under a year, and let me remind you these direct probes need to be drilled into your skull. Neuralink is not solving anything: they are scoring cheap publicity points by doing something (signal analysis) nobody has done that much before, because it is too early to do it

These guinea pigs will be worse off after neuralink will have (ab)used them for this publicity stunt.

Neuralink has previously discussed their implantations in monkeys, in which they claim implantations for > 1 year with increasing performance (e.g., in their deep dive on youtube [1]). That would seem to indicate that this wasn't seen in animal studies (maybe just a matter of degree). Figure 04 they have in the article suggests a steady state may have been reached with respect to some factors, but I guess they could continue to improve things on the model side while still experiencing degradation if the improvements outpace the effect of degradation. Since this doesn't seem to impact safety, it doesn't seem like a follow-up surgery would be needed as long as the device continues to be useful; if it essentially became a brick then the patient would probably want it removed (which requires another surgery). They've never talked about any surgeries for "maintenance" before, and given the size of the threads, I doubt the same previously implanted ones could be reinserted.

1. Neuralink Show and Tell, Fall 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4)

> 2. Will it degrade further? Are follow-up surgeries needed?

They said in the weeks following and it doesn't seem to have continued to happen. However I would expect things to degrade eventually as this is still very early days.

Why are the electrodes retracting?

There sure isn’t.