(Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson under CC BY 2.0) Non-invasive technology is less risky but also less powerful, as the signals coming from the brain are muffled by the pesky layers of bone and skin that make up the human head. While Neuralink is excitedly advertising its first human trials, it's still well behind a handful of companies — and according to Musk biographer Ashlee Vance at least two rivals are living rent-free in the billionaire's head: - Synchron: whose tech (the Stentrode) enters patients' brains via blood vessels using a stent, implanted its first interface in a US patient last year and completed enrolment for its first US clinical trial. It also received a $75 million cash injection at the end of last year from investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and former Neuralink president Max Hodak.
- Onward: a Dutch company that specializes in spinal implants to help people with spinal cord injuries regain mobility.
The stated ambitions of these companies — for the near future, at least — is focused on people with severe disabilities and impairments. Neuralink has said its first goal is to allow quadriplegics to control computers and mobile devices using their brain chips. Synchron's Stentrode has already allowed people to do the same, and Onward has already seen some success in restoring movement to people with spinal cord injuries. Consolidated Brains: Dr. Rylie Green, a neuroscientist at Imperial College, told The Daily Upside that while the current generation of startups are essentially research vehicles, there are already four big, dominant players in the space — Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Abbott, and Livanova — who furnish patients with proven technology like deep brain stimulation. Green believes that as smaller companies prove their technology is viable, bigger industry fish will probably start hunting for tasty acquisitions. Brainonomics
While the effect of these devices could be nothing short of miraculous for individual patients, Jackson said that for the economics of these commercial companies to work long-term, they need broader appeal. "[invasive technologies] will find applications in the more severe cases of injury or disability, I think there's a slight problem, that those aren't necessarily big enough markets to support the kind of investment that we're seeing at the moment." he said. "The problem that we need to solve at the moment is that the current generation of interfaces are still quite limited," he added. "So you can do things like moving a cursor around on a computer screen [...] But for people with, say spinal cord injuries, they already have other ways that they can interact with computers. For instance, of eye trackers or sensors that are picking up movements that have been spared from the injury. So the devices need to work quite a bit better than existing technologies to be useful on a day-to-day level." Jackson said the question of where to find a bigger market for neural interfaces is still unanswered. "It may be that the killer application hasn't been figured out just yet," he said. Some less-invasive neural tech companies have marketed their products for consumers, rather than as medical tools. Neurable and Emotiv both sell electroencephalogram (EEG) headphones they claim help with concentration by monitoring brain activity. Even Apple has filed a patent for a similarly kitted-out Airpod, but Jackson doesn't see the consumer space for neural interface tech going much further. "For control of actual computers, the signals are not going to be that great. You wouldn't want to drive your car along a fast motorway with the car just being controlled by EEG signals from your headset," he said. For medical purposes, Green said she thinks non-invasive tech could tap into a huge patient base that isn't well-suited to invasive solutions — dementia patients. "There is a huge potential there for a much bigger market. Because what we often forget in this space is the people we're trying to implant in are often very old. They're often people who are fragile and who can't take on surgeries, and brain surgery is not going to be the best idea for them," Green said. A USB-C for Brains: Green also believes a good industry standard for neural interface tech would be "plug and play" components, i.e., tech that can easily slot in with other companies' products. "Previously all have the workup and now it's all been, you start with a condition you design a device around how to fix that specific condition," she said. "That's great, but it puts you in the Apple scenario where you have to buy all the accessories and everything that goes with that one device." Neural Tech's Alexa Moment For Jackson, the exciting scientific frontier lies in figuring out just how similar (or different) our individual brains are. "I think the really interesting question is: To what extent can we build decoders to infer things from the brain that generalize across people?" He views the current decoding capabilities of neural tech as similar to where speech recognition was in the 1980s — when you personally had to sit and tell your computer all the words you specifically might want to say to it. "But if anyone else came into the room and started speaking to it, it would fail because it had been built to understand your voice," Jackson said. Compare that to today, where Siri and Alexa can understand just about anyone who talks to them (albeit not quite as well if that person has an accent). Jackson said not getting to an equivalent point would present a huge limitation for the industry. "It seems to me to be a practical constraint on our vision of where neural technology could take us, if it turns out we can't do that, and anyone who wants to use their Neuralink or whatever other brain implant has to sit there thinking all the things they might want to think when using this thing, and calibrating this in the old school speech-recognition way." If Alexa for your brain sounds like a wild notion then just remember: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Synchron. ***** And now, a word from our sponsor: If You Like Free Travel, Read This Uncle Sam is trying to downgrade your next vacation to a staycation. Congress is in talks to pass a bill that would make it harder for banks to fund credit card rewards and secure your data. What does it all mean? In short, the heyday of credit card rewards could soon be over and you'll no longer be swimming in award travel and cash back simply for using your credit card. Fortunately, there's still time to act. The Points Guy, your go-to source for all things credit card rewards, has made it easy for you to tell Congress to lay off your credit card points. Just fill out this form to make your voice heard and help protect your financial security. | 
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