Essentials: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains | Dr. Matt MacDougall

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Dr. Matthew MacDougall, a neurosurgeon at Neuralink. We discuss how brain-machine interfaces could help people with paralysis control computers using their intended movements, and how robotic surgery enables the placement of tiny electrodes in the brain. We also explore advances in brain tumor surgery, implant safety, how the brain and software learn to work together, and the role of animal research. Dr. MacDougall shares his vision for future applications, including restoring movement, addressing mental health conditions and expanding human cognition and communication. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Rorra: https://rorra.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Matt MacDougall (00:00:23) Brain Function, Frontal Lobes & Impulse Control (00:02:57) Brain Tumors, Laser Surgery & MRI (00:04:38) Neuralink, Brain Implants & Paralysis (00:07:04) Robotic Surgery & Electrode Placement (00:08:02) Sponsor: BetterHelp (00:10:25) Motor Cortex, Controlling Computers With the Brain (00:12:20) Implant Safety & Brain Augmentation (00:14:07) RFID Hand Implant & Everyday Uses (00:16:25) Sponsor: AG1 (00:18:03) Spinal Cord Stimulation, Reconnecting Brain & Body (00:19:00) Brain-to-Brain Communication & AI (00:21:13) Brain-Machine Interfaces, Learning & Adaptation (00:23:43) Animal Research & Welfare (00:26:47) Pigs & Monkeys, Device Safety & Function (00:28:04) Sponsor: Rorra (00:30:32) Future Applications, Mental Health & Human Cognition (00:33:03) Acknowledgements Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Matthew MacDougall. Dr. MacDougall, welcome.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Good to be here.

• 0:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just to kick things off, as a neurosurgeon and as a neuroscientist, can you share with us your vision of the brain as an organ as it relates to what's possible there? Surgeons tend to view the world a little bit differently than most because they like to fix and they like to mend. And in your case, have the potential to add things into the brain that don't exist there already. So how do you think about and conceptualize the brain as an organ? And what do you think is really possible with the brain that most of us don't already probably think about?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  The brain really is a collection of functional modules pinned together, duct taped together in this bone box attached to your head. And sometimes you see very interesting failure modes. So one of the most memorable patients I ever had was very early on in my training. I was down at UC San Diego and saw a very young guy who had just been in a car accident. We had operated on him. And as is so often the case in neurosurgery, we had saved his life, potentially at the cost of quality of life. When he woke from surgery with bilateral frontal lobe damage, he had essentially no impulse control left.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And so we were called back by his 80-year-old recovery room nurse saying, "You've got to come see your patient right away if something's wrong." And we walk in to see him, and he points at his elderly nurse and says, "She won't have sex with me." And it was apparent at that moment, his frontal lobes were gone. And that person is never going to have reasonable human behavior again. It's one of the most tragic ways to have a brain malfunction. But anything a brain does, anything from control of hormone levels in your body, to vision, to sensation, to the most obvious thing,

• 2:25Speaker 01

  which is muscle movement of any kind, from eye movement to moving your bicep, all that comes out of the brain. All of it can go wrong, any part of it or all of it. So yeah, working with the brain is, the substance of the brain as a surgeon, very high stakes. But once in a while, you get a chance to really help. You get a chance to fix something that seems unfixable. And you have Lazarus-like miracles, not too uncommonly. So it's extremely satisfying as a career.

• 2:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you share with us one of the more satisfying experiences? Or what qualifies as satisfying in neurosurgery?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, one of the relatively newer techniques that we do is if someone comes in with a reasonably small tumor somewhere deep in the brain that's hard to get to, the traditional approach to taking that out would involve cutting through a lot of good, normal brain and disrupting a lot of neurons, a lot of white matter, that kind of the wires connecting neurons. Then the modern approach involves a 2-millimeter drill hole in the skull down which you can pass a little fiber optic cannula and attach it to a laser and just heat the tumor up deep inside the brain under direct MRI visualization in real time. So this person is in the MRI scanner.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  You're taking pictures every second or so. As the tumor heats up, you can monitor the temperature and get it exactly where you want it, where it's going to kill all those tumor cells, but not hurt hardly any of the brain surrounding it. And so not uncommonly nowadays, we have someone come in with a tumor that previously would have been catastrophic to operate on. And we can eliminate that tumor with leaving a poke hole in their skin. Even in cases that previously would have considered totally inoperable, say a tumor in the brain stem, or a tumor in primary motor cortex, or primary verbal areas, Broca's area, where we would have expected to either not operate

• 4:33Speaker 01

  or do catastrophic damage. Those people sometimes now are coming out unscathed.

• 4:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  In your role at Neuralink and as a neurosurgeon in other clinical settings, surely you are using machines. It's, I think, a very exciting time in which engineers are starting to toss up big problems and go for it. And obviously Elon is certainly among the best, if not the best, in terms of going really big, to the extent that you are allowed. Could you share with us what the missions at Neuralink are? And what the general scope of missions are? And then, if possible, share with us some of the more specific goals? I can imagine basic goals of trying to understand the brain and augment the brain. I could imagine clinical goals of trying to repair things in humans that are suffering in some way.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Neuralink and I think Tesla and SpaceX before it end up being these blank canvases that people project their hopes and fears onto. And so we experience a lot of upside in this. People assume that we have superpowers in our ability to alter the way brains work. And people have terrifying fears of the horrible things we're going to do. Those extremes are not true. We are making a neural implant. We have a robotic insertion device that helps place tiny electrodes the size, smaller than the size of a human hair, all throughout a small region of the brain. In the first indication that we're aiming at,

• 6:05Speaker 01

  we are hoping to implant a series of these electrodes into the brains of people that have had a bad spinal cord injury. So people that are essentially quadriplegic. They have perfect brains, but they can't use them to move their body. They can't move their arms or legs. And so this pristine motor cortex up in their brain is completely capable of operating a human body. It's just not wired properly any longer to a human's arms or legs. And so our goal is to place this implant into a motor cortex and have that person be able to then control a computer. So a mouse and a keyboard, as if they had their hands on a mouse and a keyboard,

• 6:50Speaker 01

  even though they aren't moving their hands. Their motor intentions are coming directly out of the brain into the device. And so they're able to regain their digital freedom and connect with the world through the internet.

• 7:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why use robotics to insert these chips?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  These electrodes are so tiny, and the blood vessels on the surface of the brain so numerous and so densely packed that a human physically can't do this. A human hand is not steady enough to grab this couple micron width loop at the end of our electrode thread and place it accurately, blindly, by the way, into the cortical surface, accurately enough at the right depth to get through all the cortical layers that we want to reach. I would love if human surgeons were essential to this process. But very soon, humans run out of motor skills sufficient to do this job.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And so we are required, in this case, to lean on robots to do this incredibly precise, incredibly fast, incredibly numerous placement of electrodes into the right area of the brain.

• 8:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Every time I do a therapy session, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. And that's because whenever I finish a therapy session, I come away with a valuable insight or new perspective on something I'm working through, whether that's with work, with relationships in my personal life, or with my relationship to myself. I've just consistently found that there's so much benefit that comes through effective therapy. With BetterHelp, they make it extremely easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits that come through effective therapy. They have a short questionnaire that helps match you to a therapist. And while BetterHelp has an industry-leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match,

• 8:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  you can switch to a different therapist at any time. And the data say it works. BetterHelp has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for its live sessions, based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Also, because BetterHelp is done entirely online, it's extremely time-efficient. There's no driving to a therapist's office, looking for parking, et cetera. If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/Huberman. So in some ways, Neuralink is pioneering the development of robotic surgeons as much as it's pioneering the exploration and augmentation and treatment of human brain conditions.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Right. And as the device exists currently, as we're submitting it to the FDA, it is only for the placement of the electrodes. The robot's part of the surgery. I or another neurosurgeon still needs to do the more crude part of opening the skin and skull and presenting the robot a pristine brain surface to sew electrodes into. Broadly speaking, the mission of Neuralink is to reduce human suffering, at least in the near term. There's hope that eventually there's a use here that makes sense for a brain interface to...

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Bring AI as a tool embedded in the brain that a human can use to augment their capabilities. I think that's pretty far down the road for us, but definitely on a desired roadmap. In the near term, we really are focused on people with terrible medical problems that have no options right now.

• 10:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  So to just give us a bit fuller picture of this, we're talking about a patient who can't move their limbs because they have spinal cord damage.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  The motor cortex that controls movement is in theory, fine.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Make a small hole in the skull and through that hole, a robot is going to place electrodes, obviously motor cortex, but then where, how is the idea that you're going to play a concert from different locations? You're going to hit all the keys on the piano in different combinations. I still don't understand how the signals are going to get out of motor cortex, past the lesion and into, and out to the limbs, because the lesion hasn't been dealt with at all in this scenario.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  So just to clarify there, I should emphasize, we're not in the immediate future, talking about reconnecting the brain to the patient's own limbs. That's on the roadmap, but it's way down the roadmap, a few years. What we're talking about in the immediate future is having the person be able to control electronic devices around them with their motor intentions alone, right?

• 11:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  So prosthetic hand and arm or just mouse and, and keys on a.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Mouse and keys on a keyboard for starters. So you wouldn't see anything in the world move. As they have an intention, the patient might imagine, say, flexing their fist or moving their wrist. And what would happen on the screen is the mouse would move down and left and click on an icon and bring up their word processor and then a keyboard at the bottom of the screen would allow them to, you know, select letters in sequence and they could type. So we're using smarter algorithms to decode the motor intentions out of the brain. We have been able to do this in monkeys really well. So we have, you know, a small army of monkeys playing video games for, you know, smoothie rewards. And they do really well.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  We, we actually have the world record of bitrate of information coming out of a monkey's brain to, you know, intelligently control a cursor on a screen. We're doing that better than anyone else.

• 12:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Would you be willing or are you willing, if allowed, to have these electrodes implanted into your motor cortex?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I, I would be excited to do that. I think for the first iteration of the device, it wouldn't be very useful because I can still move my limbs. And our first outputs from this are things that I can do just as easily with my hands. Right. Moving a mouse, typing in a keyboard. We are necessarily making this device as a medical device for people with bad medical problems and no good options. It wouldn't really make sense for an able-bodied person to get one in the near term. As the technology develops and we make devices specifically designed to perform functions that can't be done even by an able-bodied person. Say eventually refine the technique to get to the point where you can type faster

• 13:15Speaker 01

  with your mind and one of these devices than you can with text to speech or speech to text and your fingers. That's a use case that makes sense for someone like me to get it. It doesn't really make sense for me to, you know, get one when it allows me to, you know, use a mouse slightly worse than I can with my hand currently. That said, the safety of the device I would absolutely vouch for. From, you know, the hundreds of surgeries that I've personally done with this. I think it's much safer than many of the industry standard FDA approved surgeries that I routinely do on patients that, you know, are, are, no one even thinks twice about their standard of care.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Neuralink has already reached in my mind, a safety threshold that is far beyond a commonly accepted safety threshold.

• 14:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Along the lines of augmenting one's biological function or functions in the world. I think now's the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand. For those listening, not watching, there's a, a small lump between Dr. MacDougall's forefinger and thumb or index finger and thumb placed on skin on the top of his hand. You've had this for some years now because we've known each other for, gosh, probably seven years now or so. And you've always had it in the time that I've known you. What is that lump? And why did you put it in there?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's a, a small writable RFID tag. So it's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can temporarily power. If you approach an antenna, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth. Most phones have the capability of reading and writing to this chip. For years, it let me into my house. It unlocked a deadbolt on my front door. For some years, it unlocked the doors at Neuralink and let me through, you know, the, the various locked doors inside the building.

• 15:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  What other sorts of things could one put into these RFID's in theory? And how long can they stay in there before you need to take them out and recharge them or replace them?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Well, the, these are passive. They're coated in biocompatible glass. And as an extra, I'm a rock climber and so I was worried about that glass shattering during rock climbing. I additionally coated them in another ring of silicone before implanting that. So it's, it's pretty safe. They're passive. There's no battery. There's no active electronics in them. So they could last the rest of my life. I don't think I'd ever have to remove it for any reason. You know, at some point, the, the technology is always improving. So I might remove it and upgrade it. Already there's, you know, 10x more storage versions available. That could be a, a drop in replacement for this if I ever remove it.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  It has a small niche use case and it's an interesting proof of concept tiptoeing towards the concept that you mentioned of, you know, you have to be willing to go through the things that you're suggesting to your patients in order to, you know, say with a straight face that you think this is a reasonable thing to do.

• 16:25Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 17:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega three coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega three coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. I'd like to go back to brain augmentation. You've made very clear that one of the first goals for Neuralink is to get quadriplegics walking again.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Well, again, just, just to be very clear, the first step is we, we aren't reconnecting the patient's own muscle system to their motor cortex.

• 17:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Allowing them, excuse me, agency over the movement of things in the world.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  And eventually their body.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And you're exactly right. Yeah, eventually their body. We would, we would love to do that. And we've done a lot of work on developing a system for stimulating the spinal cord itself. And so that gets to the question that you, that you asked a few minutes ago of how do you reconnect the motor cortex to the rest of the body? Well, if you can bypass the damaged area of the spinal cord and have an implant in the spinal cord itself, connected to an implant in the brain and have them talking to each other. You can take the perfectly intact motor signals out of the, the motor cortex and send them to the spinal cord, which most of the wiring should be intact in the spinal cord below the level of, say, the, the injury caused by a car accident or motorcycle accident or gunshot wound or whatever.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And it should be possible to reconnect the brain to the body in that way. So not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, in some small number of years, that Neuralink will be able to reconnect somebody's own body to their brain.

• 19:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Along the lines of augmentation, early on in some of the public discussions about Neuralink that I overheard between Elon and various podcast hosts, et cetera. There was this idea thrown out that, for instance, that you would have some chips in your brain and I would have some chips in my brain and you and I could just sit here looking at each other or not, nodding or shaking our heads and essentially hear each other's thoughts.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 19:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that possible that we could sit here and just hear each other's thoughts? And, and also how would we restrict what the other person could hear?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so absolutely. I mean, think about the fact that we could do this right now. If you pulled out your phone and started texting me on my phone and I looked down and started texting you, we would be communicating without looking at each other or talking. Shifting that function from a phone to an implanted device, it requires no magic advance, no leap forward. It's technology we already know how to do. If we say, put a device in that allows you to control a keyboard and a mouse, which is our stated intention for our first human clinical trial. And so, you know, texting each other with our brains is maybe an uninspiring rendition of this, but it, it's not very difficult to imagine the implementation of

• 20:14Speaker 01

  the same device in a more verbally focused area of the brain that allows you to more naturally speak the thoughts that you're thinking and have me, have them rendered into speech that I can hear, you know, maybe via a bone conducting implant. So silently hear. The thing that attracts a lot of us to a technology like Neuralink is that the ceiling is incredibly high. There's no obvious reason that you can't interface with millions of neurons as this technology is refined and developed further. So that's the kind of wide band, you know, high bandwidth brain interface that you want to develop if you're talking about a semantic prosthetic and AI assistant to your cognitive abilities.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  You know, the more sci-fi things that we think about in the coming decades. So it's an important caveat when you're evaluating these technologies. You really want it to be something that you can expand off into the sci-fi.

• 21:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  To what extent can these brain machine interfaces?

• 21:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Learn and get better and better and better because it's also listening to the nervous system that it's trying to support.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Right. It goes both ways. Basically, what you're doing is taking a very crude software intelligence, I would say, not exactly a full blown AI, but some well-designed software that can adapt to changes in firing of the brain. And you're coupling it with another form of intelligence, a human intelligence, and you're allowing the two to learn each other. So undoubtedly, the human that has a Neuralink device will get better at using it over time. Undoubtedly, the software that the Neuralink engineers have written will adapt to the firing patterns that the device is able to record and, over time,

• 22:07Speaker 01

  focus in on meaningful signals toward movement, right? So if a neuron is high firing rate when you intend to move the mouse cursor up and to the right, it doesn't know that when it starts. When you first put this in, it's just a random series of signals, as far as the chip knows. But you start correlating it with what the person, what you know the person wants to do, as expressed in a series of games. So you assume that, you know, that the person wants to move the mouse on the screen to the target that's shown, because you tell them that's the goal. And so you start correlating the activity that you record when they're moving toward an up and right target on a screen with that firing pattern.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  And similarly, for up and left, down and left, down and right. And so you develop a model semi-intelligently in the software for what the person is intending to do, and let the person run wild with it for a while. And they start to get better at using the model presented to them by the software, as expressed by the mouse moving or not moving properly on the screen, right? Imagine a scenario where you're asking somebody to play piano, but the sound that comes out of each key randomly shifts over time. Very difficult problem, but a human brain is good enough with the aid of software to solve that problem and map well enough to a semi-sable state that they're going to know how to use

• 23:36Speaker 01

  that mouse, even when they, say, turn the device off for the night, come back to it the next day, and some of the signals have shifted.

• 23:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's talk about pigs.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Elon and others, they're at Neuralink, have shared some of the progress that they've made in experimental animals that understandably evoke some strong emotions in people. What was the rationale for using pigs?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Well, let me say first, Neuralink is almost entirely composed of animal-loving people. If there was any possible way to help people the way we want to help people without using animals in our research, we would do it. It's just not known how to do that right now. And so we are completely restricted to making advances, to getting a device approval through the FDA by first showing that it's incredibly safe in animals.

• 24:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  As is the case for any medical advancement, essentially.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  You know, I think we would probably be having a very different conversation around animal research if we weren't, you know, we as a species, we as a culture, weren't just casually slaughtering millions of animals to eat them every single day. And so that is a background against which the relatively minuscule number of animals used in research, it becomes almost impossible to understand why someone would point to that ridiculously small number of animals used in research when the vast, vast majority of animals that humans use and end their lives are done for food. In that context, we do animal research

• 25:14Speaker 01

  because we have to. There's no other way around it. If tomorrow, laws were changed and the FDA said, okay, you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants, that would be a very interesting option. I think there would be a lot of people that would step up and say, yes, I'm willing to participate in early-stage clinical research.

• 25:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  You already volunteered.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I wouldn't be alone. On that note, to whatever extent possible, I think Neuralink goes really, really far, much, much farther than anyone I've ever heard of, any organization I've ever heard of, anything I've ever seen, to give the animals agency in every aspect of the research. We have just an incredible team of people looking out for the animals and trying to design the experiments such that they're as purely opt-in as humanly possible. No animal is ever compelled to participate in experiments beyond the surgery itself. So if, say, on a given day, our star monkey pager doesn't

• 26:18Speaker 01

  want to play video games for smoothie, no one forces them to, ever. They have free and full access to food this entire time. So they aren't hungry, they aren't thirsty. The only thing that would motivate them is if they want a treat extra to their normal rations. There's never any deprivation, there's never any adverse negative stimuli that pushes them to do anything. It's one of the underappreciated innovations out of Neuralink is how far the animal care team has been able to move in the direction of humane treatment of these guys.

• 26:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why pigs?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Pigs are, you know, they're actually fairly commonly used in medical device research. More, you know, in the cardiac area, their hearts are, you know, somewhat similar to human hearts. There's a lot of different kinds of pigs that we use in different contexts when we're trying to optimize a certain characteristic. So, yeah, the pigs are, we don't necessarily need them to be smart or task performers, although occasionally we have, you know, trained them to walk on a treadmill when we're studying how their limbs move for some of our spinal cord research. But we're not, you know, recording interesting,

• 27:29Speaker 01

  say, cognitive data out of their minds. They're really just a biological platform with a skull that's close enough in size and shape to humans to be a valid platform to study the safety of the device. So again, the pigs are really just a safety platform. To say the device is safe to implant, it doesn't, you know, break down or cause any kind of toxic reaction. The monkeys are where we are really doing our heavy lifting in terms of ensuring that we're getting good signals out of the device, that what we expect to see in humans is validated on the functional level in monkeys first.

• 28:04Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 29:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  assume that the clinical stuff can be worked out. Or maybe you have a pet clinical condition that you just are just yearning to see resolved. That would be fine, too. But in addition to that, where you really just expand out, let's say we can extend your life 200 years, or we're thinking about the kind of world that your children are going to live in and their grandchildren will live in. What do you think is really possible with brain augmentation and brain machine interface? And here, please feel no bias whatsoever to answer in a way that reveals to us your incredible empathy and consideration of clinical conditions,

• 30:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  because that's how you spend your days, is fixing patients and helping their lives be better. So if it lands in that category, great. But for sake of fun and for sake of delight and for sake of really getting us, the audience, to understand what's really possible here, please feel no shackles.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love the idea down the road, and we're talking, you know, a 10-year, maybe 20-year timeframe of humans just getting control over some of the horrible ways that their brains go wrong, right? So I think everybody at this point has either known someone or second-order known someone, a friend of a friend, who has been touched by addiction or depression, suicide, obesity. These functions of the brain or malfunctions of the brain are what drives me. These are the things that I want to tackle in my career.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  In terms of my kid's lifetime, I'm thinking, you know, full human expansion of human cognition into AI, full immersion in the internet of your cognitive abilities, having no limitation for what you think, as bottlenecked by needing to read the Wikipedia article first, to have the data to inform your thoughts. Having communication with anyone that you want to, unrestricted by this, you know, flapping air past meat on your face. It's a, you know, a means of communication that's ridiculously prone to being misunderstood. It's also a

• 31:54Speaker 01

  tiny, narrow bottleneck of communication. We're, you know, trying to send messages back and forth through a tiny straw. And there's no reason that needs to necessarily be true. It's the way things have always been, but it isn't the way things are going to be in the future. I think there's a million very sci-fi possibilities in terms of banding human minds together to be even more potent as a multi-unit organism, you know, as an opt-in, multi-brain. You know, these are things that are so far down the road, I can't even directly see how they would be implemented. But the technology we're working on is a little crack in the door that allows some of this stuff to even be thought about in

• 32:38Speaker 01

  a realistic way. To that point, I, you know, encourage anyone who is, you know, excited about things like that, you know, especially mechanical engineers, software engineers, robotics engineers, come to the Neuralink website and look at the jobs we've got. We need the brightest people on the planet working on these, the hardest problems in the world, in my opinion. And so if you want to work on this stuff, come help us.

• 33:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  I really want to thank you, first of all, for coming here today and taking time out of your important schedule of seeing patients and doing brain surgery, literally.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Happy to do it.

• 33:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Time away from your family and time away from your mission at Neuralink, briefly, to share with people what you guys are doing. And I really just want to thank you also for being you, which is perhaps, sounds like a kind of an odd thing to hear. But I think, as made apparent by the device implanted in your hand, you don't just do this for a job. You live and breathe and embody, truly embody, this stuff around the nervous system and trying to figure out how to fix it, how to make it better. And you live and breathe it, and I know your deep love for it. So I want to thank you for not just the brains that you put into it and the energy you put into it, but also for the heart that you put into it.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Thanks for that, Andrew. I appreciate that. We just want to help people. We want to make things better.