This Chip Can Read Your Mind By Watching Your Brain Work

Understanding the human brain is an important but no easy task. However, a team of scientists has designed a chip that’s better at reading people’s minds that all existing methods.

In the research released last Friday, the scientists describe how they developed a chip that can read the human brain by taking the most advantage of the current brain-computer interface tech, like what’s used in the Neural link system of Elon Musk. Then they meld it with silicon chip tech that’s highly scalable. The result is a chip that can record more data while being less invasive than existing models.

The paper’s first author Abdulmalik Obaid stated that the team achieved this as they found a way of adapting 2D chip tech to fit the 3D brain of the human. He said that no one had matched 2D silicon electronics to the brain’s 3D architecture before, so they had to forget everything they knew about traditional chip fabrication to design new processes to be able to bring silicon electronics into 3D structures. And they tried to come up with a way that could be scaled up easily.

Basically, their design inserts microwires smaller than a human hair across into exposed brain tissue and connects these wires to a silicon chip to obtain electric signals. Instead of 100 microwires that create 100 communication channels for the neural signals, the new chip can create thousands of channels.

According to the paper’s senior author Nick Melosh, this approach could allow for extremely high-resolution signals. He specifically said that electrical activity is among the highest-resolution ways to look at brain activity and this microwire array can help us see what’s going on inside the human brain on the single-neuron level.

Besides high-resolution, the research team also write that in their animal trial, they could record neural signals from deep in the brain of a rat while not having to remove any part of its tissue as required in previous methods.

They spent years refining the approach and could finally see how effective it was in practice. Obaid said that they had to use kilometers of microwires and create large-scale arrays, then they had to connect them directly to the silicon chips. When they tested it for the first time on the retina after years of work, the chip worked right away.

Following their first successful trial on animals, the team is now looking to test the model on larger animals and then the human brain. If the chip really works in the real world, it will help improve human prosthetics like devices translating electric signals between the brain and a robotic hand or limp. The chip could also help devices that restore speech or vision in a patient.

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