A brain chip developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink restores communication to an ALS patient

In a moving video that was recently published, he is seen sitting in front of the computer, while he is thinking of a sentence and the digital device thinks it up for him in his original voice, the one he had before the degenerative disease robbed him of the ability to speak.

This technological development, which is based on an advanced brain-computer interface, manages to bypass the nerve damage and transform electrical signals from the neurons into clear words, thus giving new hope to thousands of people who have lost their most basic ability to communicate.

In those days he already had a lot of difficulty uttering simple words, and the fear of being trapped inside his body without being able to communicate grew stronger. He decided to apply and join the group of pioneers who are trying to bridge the gap between the brain and the machine.

The surgical procedure he underwent was short and precise, and his partner described how he was released to his home already one day after the operation. The process that went from that moment on was a learning journey where Kenneth’s brain and Neuralink’s artificial intelligence learned to talk to each other in the language of electrical pulses.

In the first phase of the training, which began immediately after recovering from the surgery, Kenneth met with the company’s engineers to calibrate the device. They instructed him to try to say basic sentences while the algorithm mapped his neural intentions. At this stage patients tend to experiment with different mouth movements to find what activates the chip in the best way.

Kenneth was instructed to pronounce words slowly, and machine learning engineers used this data to build an accurate model of his brain activity. In February 2026, the second phase began, in which the system already knew how to decipher his silent mouth movements.

Kenneth moved his lips without producing a sound, and the computerized interface knew how to interpret his speech and turn it into a voice output. The third and most exciting step of all was the decoding of imagined speech, where Kenneth simply thought the words without moving a muscle in his face, and the system was able to bring these thoughts out loud and clear.

The technology behind this achievement is the result of years of development and includes the chip that is the size of a large coin and is implanted inside the skull. 64 flexible and extremely thin wires protrude from the chip, on which are installed 1,024 electrodes that record the neural activity with a resolution never before seen in medicine.

These threads are thinner than a human hair, so their implantation requires extreme surgical precision. For this purpose, Neurlink developed the robot R1, a sophisticated machine that is equipped with five camera systems and advanced optical technology that allows it to insert the electrodes into the brain tissue without damaging tiny blood vessels.

The robot navigates within the complex structure of the cerebral cortex and ensures that each wire is placed exactly in the area responsible for movement and speech, allowing the system to receive the electrical signals with maximum precision.

ALS patients experience a disconnection between the brain and the muscles even though the brain commands continue to be generated as an orderly. The Neuralink chip simply reads these commands at their point of origin and sends them to the computer, thereby bypassing the damaged spinal cord and nerves.

The system functions as an internal microphone that listens to individual neurons, which enables a much higher decoding level than previous systems that were based on external sensors or eye tracking.

The result is a speech rate that approaches that of a healthy person, when patients in similar experiments were able to produce about 32 words per minute with a very low error rate of only 2.5%. Compared to the existing dictation systems in smart phones, which have an error rate of about 5%, this is a very significant technological improvement.

The history of Neurlink is full of difficult challenges and sharp public criticism. The company was founded in 2016 out of Musk’s vision to connect the human brain to artificial intelligence, but the road to human trials went through years of animal experiments that caused a stir.

Reuters news agency previously revealed harrowing reports of pigs and monkeys dying during development, with claims that the company was unsafely speeding up to meet tight schedules. In one case, the company was reported to have implanted components of the wrong size into 25 out of 60 pigs, necessitating their euthanasia.

Federal investigations were launched to check the conditions of the animals and the safety of the chips, and only after significantly improving the procedures and receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2023, the company was allowed to start implanting the chips in humans.

During the experiment with him, it was discovered that some of the wires implanted in the brain were slightly withdrawn from their place, which caused a decrease in the decoding ability of the chip. The Neuerlink engineers did not panic and managed to develop a software update that made the chip more sensitive to signals that remained active, thus giving the child back full control of his devices. This ability to update the chip remotely emphasizes the flexibility of the system and its ability to improve over time without the need for repeated analyses.

The progress in recent months in ALS patients opens a window to a future where this disease will no longer be a sentence of silence. ALS disease damages the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that are responsible for the voluntary muscles, and when they are destroyed, the muscles weaken to complete paralysis that eventually leads to death.

Until now, patients had to rely on slow and cumbersome eye-tracking systems to communicate, a tedious process where the patient had to look at letters one by one.

Neuralink’s interface enables direct and much faster communication, with the system learning a huge vocabulary of over 125,000 words and syllable combinations. The voice that is produced is a digital voice programmed to sound as close as possible to the patient’s voice before they got sick, which gives the patient a sense of identity and a deeper personal connection with the environment.

The forecast for the coming years is ambitious and includes the expansion of the trials to hundreds and thousands of patients worldwide. Musk hopes to make the transplant a routine medical procedure available in many hospitals, with the goal being to lower the costs to around $40,000 per operation and transplant. Although this is a high amount, it is still more accessible than other complex medical treatments, and the expectation is that as production becomes mass-produced, the price will continue to decrease.

Meanwhile, the company is working on the Blindsight project designed to restore sight to the blind by transmitting signals directly to the visual cortex, thus bypassing damaged eyes or non-functioning optic nerves. Musk, who has already broken quite a few boundaries, believes that in the not too distant future we will see the brain chip restoring life to patients, in a paradigm shift where the human brain becomes a being that can communicate with the digital world without biological mediators.