Elon Musk hosted a live demo from his company Neuralink on August 28 that showed a pig named Gertrude with a computer chip relaying live signals from her brain.
Alongside his more well-known ventures Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk owns a company called Neuralink. Founded in 2017, Neuralink has been working on trying to make a computer chip that could be implanted in a person's brain. The device was embedded in Gertrude's skull, with wires fanning out into her brain with electrodes capable of detecting, recording, and theoretically even stimulating brain activity.To sift through the solid science and Musk's more bombastic claims, Business Insider spoke to neuroscientist Professor Andrew Jackson of the University of Newcastle, who has worked with placing neural interfaces in animals — i.e. brain chips like the ones Neuralink wants to make.
At the moment a lot of neural implants on animal test subjects involve wires poking out through the skin, and a completely wireless link covered by the skin would reduce the risk of infection, Jackson said. For the sake of any future humans who might get a Neuralink put in their brains, the welfare of test animals like Gertrude is vital, because the tests have to be conducted over several years to make sure the device doesn't become harmful at any stage, and to make sure it will work forever.
To neuroscientists like Jackson, this was nothing new. "That is something that has been shown many times before now, both for walking, the movements of the legs, and also movements of the upper limb in monkeys," he said.
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