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Goodbye earbuds! Elon Musk's Neuralink may just blast tunes right into your brain
Those trusty old earbuds could someday go the way of the dinosaur. That's because Tesla's and SpaceX's visionary billionaire Elon Musk now says that his futuristic new Neuralink implant that fits behind the ear could possibly transmit tunes right into your brain.
SYFY WIRE brought you news of this amazing invention last week, when readers were shown images of this small miracle and examples of its intended technology. Now Musk has gone on Twitter to tease a bit more about how Neuralink might work and what its longterm potential is.
Beyond an internal soundtrack, this revolutionary brain-machine interface hopes to achieve a type of symbiosis that could one day be employed to treat and heal those with cranial injuries or other cerebral traumas. Musk believes that a high-bandwidth, mind-melding interface could be a path toward intimately uniting humankind with AI.
Up until now, Musk has been murky about what precise implementations this Neuralink product will be utilized for, but he's recently been unveiling additional info as the device's official Aug. 28 debut looms ever closer.
The Neuralink project has three distinct goals: To increase by orders of magnitude the number of neurons you can read from and write to in the human brain in safe, long-lasting ways; at each stage, to produce devices that serve critical unmet medical needs of patients; and to make the implant procedure as simple and automated as LASIK.
Musk and his team are convinced this cyborgian accessory will be a pioneering technology with limitless usages, inserted via a thin set of micro threads designed to implant electrodes through tiny holes in the skull.
They imagine using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to control smartphones to deliver music, data, or textual data while also becoming remarkable tools for medicine, psychology, and surgery.
But will Musk's magical device be capable of bypassing the ear's cochlear nerves to stream heavy metal anthems or classic symphonies straight into the brain? Musk seems to think so. However, the exact method of neurological delivery is still somewhat fuzzy.
Next-generation headphones from other firms have offered the dream of blasting music “straight to your brain,” but this is only achieved by delivering vibrations to the skull, and not directly massaging and stimulating brain neurons. To achieve even greater heights of technological sorcery, Musk is putting the word out to other brainiac engineers and hard-driving visionaries.
Until other extreme challenges are addressed and conquered, though, we'll keep the trusty earpods handy!
