Neural Interfaces

The Line Between Brain and Machine Is Already Blurring

There's a man named Noland Arbaugh who plays chess on the internet. He plays Mario Kart. He scrolls through Reddit. He controls his computer cursor with his thoughts.

Noland is quadriplegic. Eight years ago, a diving accident severed his spinal cord. He can't move anything below his shoulders.

In January 2024, Neuralink implanted a chip in his brain with 1,024 electrodes. Now he thinks about moving the cursor, and it moves.

This isn't science fiction. This is neural interfaces—the technology of connecting brains directly to machines. And it's further along than most people realize.

The Core Insight

Your brain is an electrical organ. Neurons communicate through voltage spikes—tiny electrical pulses that propagate across networks of billions of cells. Those spikes encode everything: perception, memory, intention, consciousness.

We're learning to read those spikes. And increasingly, we're learning to write them.

Cochlear implants have been restoring hearing for forty years—they convert sound into electrical signals and feed them directly into the auditory nerve. Deep brain stimulation treats Parkinson's tremors in hundreds of thousands of patients. Experimental systems let paralyzed people control robotic arms, type messages, and browse the web using nothing but neural activity.

The technology is crude. We're recording from thousands of neurons when the brain has 86 billion. The signals are noisy. The implants degrade over time. We don't fully understand what we're reading.

But it works. And it's getting better fast.

The Series

The State of the Art — What brain-computer interfaces can actually do right now. The mature technologies and the experimental frontiers.

Neuralink: Musk's Bet on the Brain — The N1 implant, the first human patients, the vision and the controversy.

Synchron: The Less Invasive Alternative — The stentrode approach that doesn't require open brain surgery. Threading electrodes through blood vessels.

Motor Prosthetics: Restoring Movement — How BCIs give paralyzed patients control back. The research from BrainGate and beyond.

Sensory Feedback: Restoring Touch — Adding sensation to prosthetic limbs. Making artificial hands that can feel.

Cochlear Implants: The Success Story — Forty years of proven neural interface technology. What worked and why.

Deep Brain Stimulation — Pacemakers for the brain. Treating Parkinson's, depression, and OCD with targeted electrical stimulation.

Mind Uploading: Science or Fantasy? — The speculative frontier. Whole brain emulation, substrate independence, and whether consciousness can be copied.

Synthesis: The Cyborg Future — Where brain-machine interfaces are heading. What it means for identity, privacy, and what humans might become.

Why This Matters Now

The first generation of neural interfaces is medical: restoring lost function to people with disabilities. But the technology won't stop there.

Enhancement is coming. Memory augmentation. Direct brain-to-brain communication. Sensory expansion beyond human limits. The same electrodes that let Noland control a cursor could theoretically let anyone interface directly with information, with machines, with other minds.

The question isn't whether we'll merge with our technology. The question is how, and who decides.

The brain is an electrical organ. We're learning to speak its language.

Begin with The State of the Art to understand what neural interfaces can actually do—and what's coming next.