Speaking With The Mind | Neuralink transcript

In a few words, tell me what you're calling about. [speech impaired by ALS] I need help with a claim. I didn't quite catch that. Can you try asking in a different way? Terry is an extrovert. He loves to talk, and it is heartbreaking to see what he's going through. and it is heartbreaking to see what he's going through. We also thought, you know what? With change comes opportunity. So we wanted to make sure that today you walked away with an understanding of opportunity and the opportunities that are out there.

That’s part of his identity that now is no longer there because of the ALS. He had made partner relatively recently at his company and was really enjoying kind of the apex of his career, It was becoming difficult to communicate with his clients as well as with his peers at work. He would come home from a business dinner and his speech would get slurred. And at first I would joke with him, I'm like, Oh, how much wine did you have with dinner?

And he would look at me and go, I didn't have any wine. He unfortunately was placed on long-term disability and retired from his career that he was enjoying. He's getting to a point where I'm having trouble understanding more and more of what he's saying on a regular basis. That's one of my biggest fears, is that I'll lose that ability to communicate with him and know instinctively what he's needing. It takes a while to digest that, and learning more about the condition, and we finally hit a point where, okay, you know, we've kind of made peace.

This is the diagnosis. What can we still do? And how can we still be happy, and thrive? [speech impaired by ALS] Losing my voice has affected me in a lot of ways. I hope this will allow me to be a part of the conversation again. Terry will be the third participant in the Neuralink voice study. The more we learned about the study, and what this would mean to him, It just seems like it's a no brainer. He needs to have his voice, and this can give him that.

At that point, I was all in, and said, sure, let's go for it. First, we're going to connect to your implant, and use this to look at some of the signals that it's producing. And we'll see if there's any modulation when you try and think about doing different actions. Every row on this view is one channel on the implant. And so there's 3000 of those channels in this implant. And so as this thing sweeps across its populating new data in each column, and so this is a real time view of the neural signals.

One thing you can try to do, is we can try and get these to light up a little bit. Since we implanted this in the speech motor region, if you try and think or attempt speaking, we might be able to see some modulation. So now, do you want to try and give this a “hello world”? Hello world. Okay, that's pretty colorful. Yeah. This is already super exciting to see, like how much activity lights up when you try and do different things.

The next thing we want to do is collect data. And we'll actually build a decoder, taking your neural signals and translating them into your intended speech. You'll see a sentence on the screen, and you'll attempt the best you can, to speak that sentence. Our understanding doesn't matter. All that matters are your brain signals and your intention. Make sense? I think so. OK, let’s do this. “A leather handbag would be a suitable gift.” “Employee layoffs coincided with the company’s reorganization.” You'll start with this, it’ll turn blue, you'll say what you want to say.

Then you'll press this button And that will say it out loud, through the computer speakers. Sound good? I don't know. And press that top button. Hello, how are you doing today? You just got your voice back. That impact of giving him his speech back has been remarkable giving him a piece of his life back that is just such an integral part of him. Neuralink has given me back my voice. Do you have more information about that?

Great, thank you. This works really, really well. With ALS, you start learning about what your priorities are, and it does put a lot of things into perspective. What this means for him and for us something that I know I took for granted to just be able to have a conversation with my husband, this means the world to us, to be able to have that communication back. That was total game changer for me. Is that all your brain waves?

Oh, my gosh, that is so cool. Watch this. What? You're thinking the words? And they're popping up? I, I love you. Oh God. Getting back to normal life is what having Neuralink is all about.