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Comment by e_y_ | Hacker News Reader

I vaguely recall from the first Neuralink presentation that the cameras used on the robots are fast enough to take the pulsing of the blood into consideration and compensate for it.

Personally I think even though it's an amazing technical accomplishment, the robotic electrode installation might be the simplest part of this whole thing. Once you have the electrodes installed, you might be able to pick out certain patterns, and maybe even restore motor function to people who have lost it.

But the part about being able to replay memories seems incredibly far-fetched. We have no idea how to really interface with the brain. We can only really talk to a small fraction of the neurons, because you can only fit so many electrodes and threads compared to the billions of neurons. It might end up being incredibly challenging to connect a new interface, like if you suddenly grew a tail and had to learn how to control it.

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Consider that advances in decoding how memory and other aspects of the brain work isn't going to be possible until you can read from neurons in real time with high enough temporal and spatial resolution.

Neuralink may be the enabling factor in massive advances in neuroscience, not actually a consumer product, but a microscope.

That's not necessarily useful. Trying to understand the brain starting from the neuron level is arbitrary and certain to be an extremely difficult problem, because of the incredible scale of the brain.

However, computation doesn't happen solely at the inter-neuron communication level, but also inside each neuron itself.

Finally, trying all of this in mammals and even humans, instead of trying to first do it on something like a nematode or even simpler organism is such an obvious way of putting the cart before the horse that I can't take it seriously.

There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought. I am extremely hopeful they will do some extremely good work in helping give people with various spinal chord injuries some amount of control over their limbs, including the ability to sense, which would be a tremendous life improvement and would make the whole thing worth it. But it's much, much easier to reach half the speed of light with chemical rockets than it is to understand software by studying individual transistors in a running processor.

"There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought"

You don't need to understand it, you just need to be able to derive a correlation. Look, we've already been able to do this in a crude fashion with both brainwaves and PEM and fMRI.

What you're saying is that you'll never understand biology without studying DNA, and molecular biology, but you can "understand" a complex system at many different levels. Or locating say, the language center of the brain at a gross anatomy level is useless. All of these coarse grained high level scientific discoveries have advanced the state of the art.

Neuralink isn't try to decode the bits in your neurons. They're trying to construct a broad association between spike patterns and thought processes. We've already had success doing this, they're just upping the resolution. And to say that this can't grant your more than 0 insight into how memory works is as silly as saying that brain injuries to things like the hippocampus didn't grant any kind of help in understanding memory formation.

Put another way, 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA

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