The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant’s brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.

It’s unclear what caused the threads to become “retracted” from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

  • ivanafterall
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    841 year ago

    The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

    Because that’s what people are worried about: THE LOST DATA.

      • @credo@lemmy.world
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        171 year ago

        The blog is obviously targeted towards advertisers. The future looks amazing and full of possibilities. Just think about how your 8 hours of sleep alone could be turned into product placement opportunities for nestle.

    • @mhague@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When a computer reads some signal, the 0s and 1s in it’s memory is the data. The data must be processed so that the computer can understand it.

      This computer is using threads to read neuron activity. It must necessarily receive data because if it didn’t it wouldn’t be reading neuron activity. They’re the same thing.

      This data is processed so that the computer can make sense of the brain. Once it understands some activity it generates signals that can control external devices.

      Here’s an example. Imagine a device that monitors the heart and does something to fix a problem. The device would get data on the heart and process the data so that it can perform it’s function.

      Wouldn’t monitoring health concerns and mitigating data loss be extremely important in these scenarios?