I passed along this thread to Ritchie, so hopefully he can chime in as he has time. We actually talk quite a bit about Neuralink, and have colleagues that work

I passed along this thread to Ritchie, so hopefully he can chime in as he has time. We actually talk quite a bit about Neuralink, and have colleagues that work there. Speaking for myself, I love to see the resources increased in this area of research, but am nervous that expectations are too high. Brain surgery for a consumer product seems pretty far off and the early applications will almost have to be medically motivated. That said, Neuralink seems to be doing a phenomenal job in productizing and further developing off of current electrode techniques. I hope the technology becomes available for the research community! Re noninvasive human neuroimaging, fMRI, fNIRS, MEG, or EEG are your best bet today. fMRI is probably the best of these in terms of what can be decoded from thoughts/perception, and has the highest spatial resolution. I think these have come down in size as to fit in a van, but certainly not very mobile and require powerful magnets. They also capture a proxy of neural activity, the blood oxygenation level, a proxy for neural activity. ipad dying so will try to update this comment in a bit... Edit (continued): > Could ML / signal processing increase the resolution of EEGs? Could we ever extract video signal from an EEG? The skull acts as a low pass filter and most of the high information content resides at higher frequencies. This seems to make it impossible to decode, say, speech or imagery from the brain’s activity. No ML can save you from a low pass filter. > Can an EEG induce perception into a brain? EEG is a recording technique, but tCDS has some mixed evidence for increasing alertness. Transcranial magnetic stimulation definitely can trigger a percept if done over visual cortex, but it’s not very fine in detail. Targeted ultrasound may do better in the future. > With regard to optogenetics, what are the things currently being studied with the technique? What pressing questions can it be used to answer? Are there any improvements to the technique that could push it further? So much to say here, will direct you to our lab website for a brief sampling https://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/publications.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/publications.html