In April 2021, scientists implanted Neuralink into a monkey's brain.
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 5:32 am
“The next step in this direction could be to decipher the topic of a person’s thoughts, what they are thinking about: geology or skateboarding. We are on the way to creating a map of all types of knowledge in the brain,” says Marcel Joost, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2019, Yukiyasu Kamitani and his colleagues showed subjects about a thousand images in an experiment to understand how visual images affect brain activity. Participants presented different pictures during an MRI scan, and a neural network compared the tomography data and the original images.
Once the neural network had learned, the subjects were phone number list presented with the same images again—and this time the neural network had to reconstruct the images based on the MRI data.
In 2019, The Guardian reported that experiments in decoding neural activity would allow large companies to read people's minds by connecting the brain to a computer, a similar view was expressed by The Independent.
Both publications cited the example of the Neuralink project , whose developers proposed placing a small chip directly in a person's head to read neuronal activity and transmit it to technology.
The system analyzed its brain activity while playing a game with a joystick and memorized which neurons were activated. This allowed the chip to predict its actions and transmit commands directly to the game.
In 2017, Facebook planned to create a non-invasive brain-connected headset that would allow people to type simply by imagining the words they wanted to say. The company sponsored several studies, but in July 2021, it abandoned the project due to technological shortcomings.
“Despite the long-term potential of neural interfaces, we have decided to focus our efforts on a different approach with faster time to market.” — Facebook.
According to Mark Slutsuki, a professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University, computers cannot yet translate abstract thoughts into text. The process is complicated by the fact that thinking involves a complex combination of images and associations.
In 2019, Yukiyasu Kamitani and his colleagues showed subjects about a thousand images in an experiment to understand how visual images affect brain activity. Participants presented different pictures during an MRI scan, and a neural network compared the tomography data and the original images.
Once the neural network had learned, the subjects were phone number list presented with the same images again—and this time the neural network had to reconstruct the images based on the MRI data.
In 2019, The Guardian reported that experiments in decoding neural activity would allow large companies to read people's minds by connecting the brain to a computer, a similar view was expressed by The Independent.
Both publications cited the example of the Neuralink project , whose developers proposed placing a small chip directly in a person's head to read neuronal activity and transmit it to technology.
The system analyzed its brain activity while playing a game with a joystick and memorized which neurons were activated. This allowed the chip to predict its actions and transmit commands directly to the game.
In 2017, Facebook planned to create a non-invasive brain-connected headset that would allow people to type simply by imagining the words they wanted to say. The company sponsored several studies, but in July 2021, it abandoned the project due to technological shortcomings.
“Despite the long-term potential of neural interfaces, we have decided to focus our efforts on a different approach with faster time to market.” — Facebook.
According to Mark Slutsuki, a professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University, computers cannot yet translate abstract thoughts into text. The process is complicated by the fact that thinking involves a complex combination of images and associations.