science

Here's a question that keeps neurosurgeons up at night: what if we could put a device in someone's brain without actually cutting into their brain? Tom Oxley, a neurologist from Melbourne, thought about this problem for years. The obvious barrier to brain-computer interfaces wasn't

Let's go to the edge. Everything we've discussed so far—Neuralink's electrodes, Synchron's stentrode, motor prosthetics, sensory restoration, cochlear implants—is real. Working. Demonstrated in humans. The technology is at different stages of development, but it exists. Now let's talk

If you want to know what a mature neural interface technology looks like—not experimental, not research-only, but actually working in the real world at scale—look at cochlear implants. Over a million people worldwide have them. Children born deaf get implanted before their first birthday and grow up hearing.

Nathan Copeland lost his arm in a car accident when he was eighteen years old. Ten years later, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh asked him an extraordinary question: would you like to feel again? They implanted electrodes in his somatosensory cortex—the region of the brain that processes touch.