With brain-computer interfaces, people with physical disabilities could one day control computers with just their thoughts, according to the co-founders of Precision Neuroscience. The company is developing an implant that could interpret and transmit electrical signals on the surface of the brain into actions on a screen. CEO Michael Mager and Chief Science Officer Benjamin Rapoport spoke with WSJ reporter Rolfe Winkler at WSJ Tech Live about how the technology works and the ways it could transform peoples’ lives. Danny Lewis hosts.
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[00:00:18] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, October 31st. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal.
[00:00:25] Have you ever looked at your computer screen and wondered what it would feel like to operate it with just your brain?
[00:00:30] Well, several companies, including Precision Neuroscience, are working on implants that can let people interact with computers just by thinking about it,
[00:00:39] and giving some people with physical disabilities new ways to interact with the digital world.
[00:00:45] At WSJ Tech Live last week, Michael Major, Precision Neuroscience co-founder and CEO,
[00:00:51] and Benjamin Rappaport, the company's co-founder and chief science officer, talked about how this technology could change people's lives.
[00:00:58] Just ahead, we'll have highlights from their conversation with our reporter, Rolf Winkler.
[00:01:07] Ben, Michael, so brain-computer interfaces.
[00:01:13] These are very exciting. What do they do?
[00:01:16] Well, a brain-computer interface is a brain implant that allows you to have direct control of a computer or external device using just your thoughts.
[00:01:25] Okay. And what are these going to be for?
[00:01:30] Who's going to use them?
[00:01:32] Well, people whose brains are functional, but the connection between the brain and the body has been disrupted either by a disease or an injury,
[00:01:41] are the first users.
[00:01:42] I'll give you a quick example just to sort of drive this home.
[00:01:45] So two people on our patient advisory board are Maria and Jules.
[00:01:49] Jules was diagnosed with ALS five years ago.
[00:01:51] ALS, very, very cruel disease.
[00:01:53] 90% is non-hereditary, so it can happen to anybody.
[00:01:58] And basically, people who have ALS, their brains continue to work totally cogent, but the brain's ability to control the body deteriorates over time.
[00:02:06] The prognosis, you know, three to five years of life expectancy.
[00:02:09] And when Maria is now Jules' wife, but also full-time caregiver.
[00:02:14] When we asked Jules, why are you dedicating time to us in the remaining time you have left?
[00:02:19] And what could this technology mean for you?
[00:02:21] You know, he really cited sort of three things.
[00:02:24] The first is he recently had a tracheotomy, which means he can't vocalize any words at all.
[00:02:29] So he communicates only through an eye tracker, which allows him to communicate at five to ten words per minute.
[00:02:35] We speak at 150.
[00:02:36] He's looking at a screen.
[00:02:37] He looks at a letter.
[00:02:38] The letter pops up and he's...
[00:02:40] And he has to sort of fix his gaze on a letter and that selects it.
[00:02:43] So it's five to ten words per minute compared to speaking at 150.
[00:02:46] It's hard to communicate with the world when your brain and your body, the connection is broken.
[00:02:50] Unbelievable.
[00:02:51] I mean, it's like all your communication is with an Apple TV remote.
[00:02:54] Imagine how frustrating that is.
[00:02:55] And so it would allow him to communicate at a human sort of normal conversational rate.
[00:03:01] So he doesn't have to self-censor.
[00:03:03] It's embarrassing to have people wait minutes for you to communicate a sentence.
[00:03:08] It just means that he ends up curtailing his thoughts.
[00:03:11] The second thing is, you know, he has a seven-year-old child.
[00:03:13] And he would like to be able to speak to him in the time he has left at a conversational rate.
[00:03:19] And the third thing is he wants to have some fun, play video games with his son.
[00:03:22] And so controlling a computer with thoughts, it may sound as if it's not that important.
[00:03:28] But I think it has the potential to be really life-changing for a large number of people.
[00:03:32] And that's the first primary purpose that these technologies will enable.
[00:03:36] You'll be able to use a computer the way somebody with functional limbs is able to use them?
[00:03:41] Exactly.
[00:03:42] We think about this just in terms of how this sort of creates a business for the brain-computer
[00:03:46] interface industry as initially focused on paralysis, so inability to use arms and hands at all,
[00:03:53] spinal cord injury, diseases like ALS, certain kinds of stroke.
[00:03:56] We think that's a sort of $2.5 to $3 billion industry.
[00:04:00] Next is people who have some form of motor deficit.
[00:04:04] They can use one of their hands.
[00:04:06] Maybe they have partial use of their hands.
[00:04:08] There are 5 million people in the United States who fit that description.
[00:04:12] And as this technology becomes more commonplace, which it will in coming years, we think there'll
[00:04:16] be adopters from that.
[00:04:17] And then beyond that, brain-computer interfaces are very likely to be a tool beyond paralysis.
[00:04:23] We're creating a high-bandwidth connection between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
[00:04:29] Morgan Stanley put out a report just earlier this month, a 37-page report on the BCI industry
[00:04:34] that estimates a $400 billion total addressable market.
[00:04:39] Was that revenue or was that the market value of the companies they hope to bank?
[00:04:43] You'll have to ask them for the sort of math behind it.
[00:04:45] Because I read it and it wasn't quite clear to me.
[00:04:47] It wasn't totally clear, but I think the fact that a major institution like Morgan Stanley
[00:04:51] is writing about this industry where there are today no public companies is just a sign
[00:04:55] that this is going to be a big and important industry.
[00:04:57] There's a big client in the industry and they'd love to keep that client, right?
[00:05:01] Coming up, how does the tech behind Precision Neuroscience's brain-computer interface actually
[00:05:06] work?
[00:05:07] We'll find out after the break.
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[00:05:42] Let's show people what we're talking about here.
[00:05:44] The Precision Neuroscience implant.
[00:05:46] Describe this for me, Ben.
[00:05:47] The way a brain-computer interface works is that there is a set of tiny little electrodes.
[00:05:52] So these, in our case, it's tiny little platinum electrodes.
[00:05:55] We work in groups of about a thousand at a time.
[00:05:58] And each of these little electrodes is about the size of an individual neuron.
[00:06:01] In our case, about 50 microns, so 50 million.
[00:06:04] Yeah, how big is this tapeworm?
[00:06:06] So that electrode array, that's about the size of a postage stamp.
[00:06:10] And on that, so about an inch by an inch square, and they're modular, so we can place many of
[00:06:16] them on the brain.
[00:06:17] And on that, what you can't see, if you were to zoom in, you'd see that there is a thousand
[00:06:20] tiny little dots of platinum embedded in what is a very thin film, thin polymer film,
[00:06:25] that's about a fifth the width of your eyelash.
[00:06:28] And that film conforms to the surface of the brain.
[00:06:31] It's part of what makes the precision technology unique.
[00:06:33] It safely conforms to the surface of the brain without doing any damage to the underlying
[00:06:37] brain.
[00:06:37] And it basically listens.
[00:06:39] Each one of those platinum electrodes basically listens to the electrical activity of the brain
[00:06:43] underneath.
[00:06:43] And the brain communicates electrically with the body and now with the world.
[00:06:48] And the amazing thing about the brain is that that thought actually has a physical manifestation.
[00:06:53] That manifestation is electrical in nature.
[00:06:55] And the precision device basically takes a video in real time, an electrical video of
[00:07:01] the thoughts that are taking place on the brain surface, records them, amplifies them,
[00:07:05] digitizes them, and then ultimately wirelessly transmits them out of the body.
[00:07:10] And using machine learning algorithms basically transforms the electrical video of human thought
[00:07:16] into the intentions that are underlying.
[00:07:18] Effectively, an app on our phone will be able to translate the electrical signals that come
[00:07:23] out of our brain.
[00:07:24] So if you think about most of us are familiar with interacting with a computer or the digital
[00:07:28] world using a keyboard or a mouse or gesture-based or voice-based interfaces.
[00:07:33] And what brain-computer interfaces do, they basically add a different manner of interacting
[00:07:38] with the world.
[00:07:39] And if we dig into it, we'll see it's actually profound because we're used to thinking of
[00:07:44] our interactions with the digital world as through a physical device.
[00:07:47] And actually, there is a latency to doing that, right?
[00:07:50] Because the thought that initiates that movement and the contact with the keyboard, the contact
[00:07:55] with the mouse, that actually takes time.
[00:07:57] We've built that into our conscious understanding of how we interact with the world.
[00:08:00] We type 100 words a minute.
[00:08:01] We can communicate with our devices very quickly.
[00:08:02] Not only that, but actually, the thought to the movement actually takes time.
[00:08:06] But actually, a brain-computer interface, the latency disappears.
[00:08:10] And so patients have a different experience of interacting with the world.
[00:08:12] So they'll be able to move faster than I can?
[00:08:14] They're going to be able to move faster than you can.
[00:08:15] Elon Musk, in 2016, founds...
[00:08:18] Was it 2016 or 2015?
[00:08:20] I mean, 16 to 17.
[00:08:22] You were there, right?
[00:08:23] Yeah.
[00:08:23] Ben is one of the...
[00:08:24] Also, the nine co-founders, along with Elon Musk, of Neuralink before you left.
[00:08:28] But you guys created the N1.
[00:08:32] And this is a little bit different.
[00:08:34] This is a little...
[00:08:35] You carve a hole in your skull.
[00:08:37] You put a little processor in that space.
[00:08:40] And there are some wires that snake out.
[00:08:42] And they implant those.
[00:08:44] They sew them into your brain.
[00:08:45] So that they get right up next to those neural signals in order to pull them out.
[00:08:50] And tell me why yours is better.
[00:08:51] That's a very provocative question.
[00:08:53] I predicted that that was coming.
[00:08:55] Whenever you have a wave of technological change that's so big, there's almost always multiple ways to approach the problem or to set of problems.
[00:09:03] We at Precision have taken an approach that's really people-focused.
[00:09:06] We're a health company.
[00:09:07] And we're using brain-computer interface technology to treat diseases of the brain and nervous system that have previously been considered untreatable.
[00:09:14] Neuralink was set up as a technology company with the idea of using brain-computer interfaces as a way of maybe changing the future direction of humanity's interactions with artificial intelligence.
[00:09:24] And when you approach the problem from a different perspective, you make different decisions.
[00:09:29] And so we're really about getting the technology safely into the brains of people with, right now, with disorders of the brain and nervous system and changing their lives.
[00:09:38] You were there.
[00:09:39] What was wrong with their approach?
[00:09:40] I'm not saying necessarily that was wrong.
[00:09:41] And why did you leave?
[00:09:42] We made a different decision, which was that—so you mentioned that the electrodes are sewn into the brain.
[00:09:48] And at Precision, as I mentioned before, our electrodes coat the brain surface.
[00:09:52] And we made that deliberate decision.
[00:09:54] Actually, early on in the history of brain-computer interfaces, it was thought that the only way to extract signals of a high enough quality was actually to implant electrodes into the brain itself.
[00:10:05] And in so doing, you do some damage to the brain, and it's a trade-off of the idea that perhaps those signals are needed from within the brain tissue.
[00:10:15] Invasiveness versus quality of the signal is really the trade-off that all the companies are—
[00:10:19] It was thought that that was the trade-off.
[00:10:21] I think that's a simplification, actually, because as it turns out, that isn't a trade-off.
[00:10:24] And so we based our electrodes on very, very high spatial fidelity without actually penetrating into the brain.
[00:10:31] And that gives you the advantage of being able to move the electrodes, search for the signals of greatest interest, and scale the number of electrodes very favorably.
[00:10:40] So we've actually—earlier this year, we've set the world record in the total number of electrodes that can be placed on the surface of the human brain.
[00:10:47] Actually, 4x, the number that Neuralink has been able to do to date, with no real ceiling in sight.
[00:10:52] And that level of bandwidth, that ability to scale the bandwidth of the interface, is actually really important in our industry.
[00:10:58] Okay, thanks, everyone.
[00:10:59] That was WSJ reporter Rolf Winkler speaking with Michael Major, Precision Neuroscience co-founder and CEO,
[00:11:06] and Benjamin Rappaport, the company's co-founder and chief science officer.
[00:11:10] And that's it for Tech News Briefing.
[00:11:13] Today's show was produced by Julie Chang, with supervising producer Catherine Millsop.
[00:11:18] I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal.
[00:11:20] We'll be back this afternoon with TMB Tech Minute.
[00:11:24] Thanks for listening.