The brain has always been the most complex organ of the human body. The capabilities of braids are still a mystery to everyone.
Have you ever wondered how a small organ can solemnly control all our thoughts, feelings, and emotions? It is out of the question to define all the functions of the brain.
But that is what researchers do? They never stop questioning.
And now, the brains are all activated to understand the mechanism of the brain. The brain’s functioning all depends on the circulation of electrochemical signals; joining it with digital electronics will give us more control and advancement over the human brain?
It is the new plan of Elon Musk based on which he launched Neuralink. Tech Entrepreneur recently gave a presentation in which he explained about an innovative brain-machine, Neuralink device. He showed that the device is implanted in a pig named Gertrude.
Many Researchers raised questions on the feasibility of this device. To reply to them, Elon Musk took to his Twitter to tweet: “It is unfortunately common for many in academia to overweight the value of ideas and underweight bringing them to fruition. The idea of going to the moon is trivial, but going to the moon is hard.”
Ray of Hope in Controlling Human Mind
The practices to control the brain started a long time back. Brain signals work with electrodes that transfer neuronal information from one end to another. It does so by translating the neuronal information into commands to which the external body system responds.
Neuro Chips were designed to record brain signals and send electrical pulses bac, which will empower human beings to control the brain’s functioning. But it seems it is not going to happen today at the complexities of the brain are much deeper than one can imagine.
Unique Brains
The brain is similar to the neverending universe, lodged with so much mystery. Neuroscientists are trying since the 1950s to unveil some of those mysteries. They have been trying to control brain cells by listening to them in awake animals.
The continuous hard work of them has given some satisfying results as well. At the beginning of the 21st century, they were able to control a digital arm using the brain signals from monkeys. In 2006, to give basic control of cursors and aiding devices, the BrainGate team began implementing arrays of 100 electrodes in the brains of paralyzed people.
Further, the Neuralink team has come up with a device that relays signals wirelessly from 1,024 electrodes implanted into Gertrude’s brain by a sophisticated robot.
Andrew Jackson, Professor of Neural Interfaces, Newcastle University, believes that the ambitions of Elon Musk are not trivial. His more-ambitious goals include telepathy, digitalization of the brain, which needs a lot more than technology.
The ‘Day’ is Perhaps Not ‘Today’
In the present time, “biomimetic” decoding is emerging as the brain device which records brain activity while the human imagines body movements. Further, after bit analyzation, the team decodes teh coding by tallying their action potentials.
But all this process and brain devices work for small movements and cannot control the whole complex brain functioning. It is practically impossible for a mind-reading device to captivate the billions of thoughts that come and go in a human brain.
While many researchers believe that Artificial Intelligence can promote such developments, it can interpret signals from someone’s brain; however, the difference in communication language still stands erect as the barrier.
Every single brain on this planet is uniques even though it shows similar large scale anatomy. The continuous efforts of neuroscientists on the group of cells open a window of hope to achieve mind reading, but the day is not today. It might work better in the future, but as per now, it doesn’t seem very easy.
Neuralink might enable people to control their brain cells. One can consider these brain devices as tools that one needs to master. You can activate your brain signals and tell it the right way to control the interface. But the functioning of the brain is not that feasible and straight. It is excessively entangled, which will take more years to come in one direction.
The Neuralink presentation displayed the functions of Electrical stimulation, which activates many cells around each electrode. But our brain is made up of different cells, each having its particular role. It is non-viable to understand the functions of different cells carrying different roles when they are mixed.
There is a hope that the stimulation of the brains’ visual areas might help blind people get a flash of light. But the reproduction of even simple visuals will need a lot more time than expected. Optogenetics might be doing great in activating genetically modified brain cells using light, but it is far from the human brain.
Conclusion:
The brain is a dark ocean of secrets, and Elon Musk’s attempts to pull some mystery out of them will lead humankind towards advancing neurotechnology. But to gain full control, the human brain needs to evolve more with the technology. The brain resists to the brain itself to unveil its secrets, which makes it even darker. Isn’t it amazing and weird to think that humans are using brains to understand brains’ functioning?
But one day might we get to know some fractions of these complexities!
