The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Science's Max Hodak

**Max Hodak** (0:00)
I think it is very possible that the first people to live to 1,000 are alive right now. It still takes some suspension of disbelief because I think biotech has just been so incremental. One of the things that's so exciting about what's happening now is that no longer really feels so incremental to me. I think that BCI we're going to come to see is not a specific product. I think there are going to be a bunch of BCI companies going after different applications where different types of probes will make sense. To me, it feels like we're firmly in the takeoff era now, like something new has happened on Earth.

**Garry** (0:31)
Welcome back to another episode of How to Build the Future. Today, we've got a real treat, Max Hodak, the co-founder of Neuralink and also founder of Science, one of the most exciting BCI, brain computer interface companies that we've ever seen. Max, welcome to How to Build the Future.

**Max Hodak** (0:52)
Thanks for having me.

**Garry** (0:52)
So Science recently announced more than 40 people have received one of your first BCI treatments, which gives people their sight back.
What is that? What's happening?

**Max Hodak** (1:03)
So we finished a big clinical trial last year, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the fall. So it's a little chip, a tiny little two-millimeter by two-millimeter silicon chip, that's implanted in the back of the eye under the retina, that it's this tiny little array of essentially solar panels. So the patients wear glasses that have a camera that looks out at the world, and then a laser projector that projects an image into the eye, and wherever the laser hits the implant, like the solar panel absorbs the light and that excites the cells directly above it. It's a retinal stimulator, and this allows us to bypass the dead rods and cones, like the cells that normally make the eye light sensitive, to get a visual signal back into the retina if they've gone blind because they've lost the rods and cones. And so yeah, I mean, there's a big clinical trial in Europe across 17 sites, and it was a huge effect. So we are submitting for approval now. It's not approved on the market yet. Hope to have that later this year.

**Garry** (1:54)
For those watching who have never heard of a brain-computer interface, what is it and what have people been able to do? What are they able to do now?

**Max Hodak** (2:03)
So the brain is this powerful computer, but it's encased in the skull. It is not magically connected to things. And so it has these handful of connections to the world, and these give you the senses that you know and the motor control that you know. But you can kind of ask like, is that to either do we want to replace these with something else? So for example, like the simulated reality or the matrix use case. Another is restoring lost functionality. So this is, I mean, this is how they're deployed today. So if someone has gone blind, you can restore the ability to see. If they've gone deaf, you can restore the ability to hear. If they're paralyzed, you can restore the ability to move. And then you can think about structural neural engineering. And this is the thing that people haven't really, we haven't gotten to as a field as much. But looking at how does the brain process information? Can you add new brain areas? Are there ways to understand how the brain is, like what is going on? Either to use this to build smarter machines or to think about how to treat things like depression or addiction.

**Garry** (3:02)
I'm taken by to what degree right now, it's about sort of taking someone who has a condition or a disease and then bringing them, like sort of restoring them to like sort of capability, right?
So I think that's playing out in AI right now as well, right? Like you had computers that had no ability to do like any sort of pure cognition or like, you know, and you know, no neurons and then suddenly a bunch of neurons. And then AGI is sort of like what a human can do. It's sort of like a restoration of capability. And then of course, there's like this other thing after that, which is, you know, ASI, super intelligence. Do you ever think about what that might be down the road? You know, what is that for BCI?

**Max Hodak** (3:48)
There are many types of BCIs. So it's there. It really is going to be a category like pharma. It's not it's not one product. I don't think there's going to be like the BCI that people get. And there are different modalities that will work for different things. So for example, I don't work on ultrasound. But one of the things I think will be possible with ultrasound is like a digital ambient or like a digital adderall. So can you like stimulate part of the brain to cause focus or sleep and things like that? It would not surprise me if that was possible. And that I could see as being more of a consumer application almost. And that won't require brain surgery hopefully. Right now the high quality ultrasound stuff does require drilling through the skull, but I think that that will be overcome. For the implantal BCIs, I mean this is a very serious brain surgery. I think that's important to appreciate. So when you think about how do you actually get this into humans and who's going to use it, I mean these are going to be very disabled patient populations. You always look at risk reward. You start at the most disabled patients. You get the most benefit for even relatively basic functionality. I don't think that you or I would want to get one of the cortical motor decoders that you might have seen out there today. Because the reality is that a keyboard and mouse is great. It is a much higher performance. You can get spoken word is 40 bits per second. Many people can type in the 20-ish bits. So the 10-bit per second cortical motor decode is not going to make your life better. I wouldn't get serious brain surgery for that.