2024-02-01 14:00:47
by Cesare Peccarisi
Telepathy, the device created by Elon Musk’s company, uses the transmission of remote signals via electromagnetic means which Marconi exploited to invent the radio. Now he will have to overcome the problem of the correctness of the connections with the nervous network
When on the morning of March 28, 1895 Guglielmo Marconi greeted with a leap of joy the rifle shot fired by his assistant to signal the arrival of the first radio message in history beyond the Emilian hills of Pontecchio, he could not imagine that a century later that idea of his, after having revolutionized the modern era, could also have given actor Christopher Reeve the hope of returning to fly in the sky of the Superman films that made him famous or Ambrogio Fogar the hope of sailing the seas again of the world with his boat.
A new type of transmission
It’s a shame that both of them, confined to wheelchairs for a long time, didn’t live long enough to know that another radio message managed to overcome an obstacle that until now was much more insurmountable than the hills surrounding Sasso Marconi: the microscopic space that opens up to divide the margins of a vertebra with nerve fibers passing through it, after a fracture of the spinal column.
Billionaire Elon Musk announced that this is now possible and has accustomed us to feats halfway between madness and genius: after extensive studies on animals he obtained authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct the first tests on humans with microchips robotically implanted at the brain and spinal level which would solve neurological problems such as traumatic injuries of the spinal column by reading the activity through 1,024 electrodes to send the right impulses through 64 microfilaments even where they were no longer able to reach, which is why the device was given the name Telepathy.
The true pioneers
The first patient just treated with this device which takes the name of Neuralink from the company founded for this purpose by Musk seems to be doing well, but to be honest the true pioneers of this method were the researchers at the Purdue Veterinary University in Indianapolis who in 2000 had developed a device called an extramedullary oscillograph in dogs which stimulated the neurons remaining beyond the vertebral fracture with electromagnetic microimpulses similar to radio waves, inducing them to regenerate and reconnect with those remaining on the other side, partially resolving the paralysis which at the time of the injury he had left them behind like a carriage detached from the moving train. The study was also resumed in humans by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine, but the preliminary results, presented at the Neuroscience Conference in New Orleans in 2012, without the push of Elon Musk’s powerful media machine, did not have the same resonance as Neuralink.
Telepathy, the predecessors
Even the adjective telepathy actually belongs to another device developed by researchers from the Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia and Duke University in North Carolina who in 2012 were the first to manage to make the water dispenser of a car work. simply caged when the housed mice thought they were thirsty. The electro-telepathic miracle was achieved by a web radio link between the microelectrodes connected to the brain neurons of the mice and a computer responsible for opening the water dispenser.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Two years ago, other German researchers from the University of Tübingen created a similar brain/computer radio link in a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative disease which progressively deprives patients of all movement, including speech, and from which he suffered. also the famous physicist Stephen William Hawking. They thus managed to make their patient Hans-Peter Salzmann regain the ability to write small sentences on the bright screen of the computer, giving him back the possibility of communicating with the world again. After months of practice he composed a 400 character message in three hours and his first words were: I want a curry potato soup.
The Italian Neuralink
Few people know that even in Italy, a start-up of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) called Corticale was founded two years ago in Genoa and has nothing to envy of Elon Musk’s Neuralink: We spoke with them and verified how the neural interfaces developed at IIT allow us to “listen” to the brain in a much more refined way. says the neuroelectronic bioengineer Luca Berdondini, head of the Microtechnology for Neuroelectronics team at the IIT and co-founder and scientific consultant of Corticale. We have in fact developed the SiNAPS technology, an acronym for Simultaneous Neural Recording Active Pixel Sensor technology which amplifies and extracts the impulses from the noise that they are so clearer, he continues.
The implantable devices we make have thousands of neural sensors and are as thick as a hair. While Neuralink must insert 64 devices to acquire data from 1,024 sensors, with SiNAPS a single device can acquire data from this number of electrodes. With this it is possible to study the normal functioning and pathologies of the nervous system to develop bio-electronic medical devices for the diagnosis and therapy of diseases such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Added to this is the creation of human-machine neural interfaces based on SiNAPS for the control of robotic devices such as prosthetic limbs or exoskeletons with which to give patients the ability to move as before. The project will ensure that SiNAPS benefits as many patients as possible. Already available today for research in neuroscience, within the next three years an all-Italian portfolio of new technologies will be ready which will be at the center of instrumentation for diagnosis, monitoring and therapy in the field of neuroscience in the near future.
Connectome
A problem that both the Genoese researchers and Elon Musk himself will have to face is the correctness of the connections of their devices with the so-called connectome – says the president of the Italian Society of Neurology, Alessandro Padovani of the University of Brescia – that is, the set of connections mainly structural but also functional of the nervous system. Within this system which can be imagined as an infinite nervous internet network, there are connectomic subsystems which are minor functional networks and these are more influenced by the continuous fluctuations induced by both internal and external distracting factors, but also by the decline in vigilance linked to aging, variable from subject to subject even in the same age group and in overlapping subjects.
Motor patterns have a static component that is intrinsic to the structural connections of their connectome and a dynamic functional component that varies from moment to moment depending on the unconscious or voluntary attention we dedicate to it. The dynamic component is triggered on the basic static connectome and if this is not stable enough, even a minimal dynamic component can cause attention to collapse for the movement to be performed, as happens, for example, to the driver who uses his cell phone behind the wheel. We do not yet know how much the interference of neural devices such as Neuralink or SiNAPS will affect the human connectome and it will still take time to understand exactly how to best use them.
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February 1, 2024 (changed February 1, 2024 | 3:25 pm)
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