Paradromics Jumps Into Your Head: The New Brain Chip That Wants You Talking
Move over, Neuralink. The tech startup Paradromics just successfully shoved a Connexus chip into a human brain, aiming to turn thoughts into speech for those who lost their voice. It is basically a USB port for your soul, but with more platinum.
The Paradromics team successfully performed a four-hour surgery at the University of Michigan to implant their Connexus device into a patient suffering from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This device, roughly the size of a coin, features 421 platinum-iridium micro-wires thinner than a human hair that penetrate brain tissue to decode speech-related signals.
Instead of just sitting in the skull, the chip connects via wires running under the skin to a transmitter tucked under the patient’s collarbone. This setup sends data wirelessly to an external receiver. Matt Angle, the CEO of Paradromics, plans to spend the next few weeks calibrating the system as the patient recovers, effectively teaching a computer to act as a vocal translator for the user's neural patterns.
The company has committed to a six-year study to track everything from speech-per-minute metrics to safety data. While Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been hogging the spotlight by letting patients play Mario Kart, Paradromics insists their focus is on long-term stability to avoid the dreaded repeat surgeries that often plague early-stage hardware.
The race to monetize the human cortex is officially on. With dreams of linking brains directly to Artificial Intelligence and treating mental disorders, the line between medical necessity and becoming a walking, talking server farm is getting thinner by the day. Surely nothing can go wrong when tech startups start treating the human mind like a firmware update.
Source: Business Insider
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