Elon Musk reveals Neuralink has implanted its second human patient

The last time we heard about the second human patient undergoing a Neuralink brain implant, the story was that they had to be canceled for the surgery due to the discovery of unforeseen medical issues.

However, it appears Neuralink found the right applicant as Elon Musk has revealed during an interview the company has successfully implanted its second Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) into a human patient. Musk revealed the news on a recent 8-hour-long episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, where the Neuralink founder sat down for an hour and a half to discuss the goal of BCIs, their potential at curing previously incurable diseases, and societal impacts of the technology being integrated with people that don't have any medical issues.

During the interview, Musk revealed the surgery with the second patient went "extremely well" and the implanted BCI is "working very well." Musk said Neuralink has detected 400 electrodes on the second patient's BCI, which are essentially the bridge between the device and the human brain's electrical signals.

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The 400 total isn't much compared to the 1,024 electrodes advertised on Neuralink's website, but Neuralink has proven with its first patient, Nolan Arbaugh, that only 10 - 10% of the electrodes need to be working to enable functionality with a computer.

Elon Musk also discussed the potential impact of Neuralink being widely adopted by the masses, saying that human communication would be revolutionized between Neuralink users as they would be able to communicate an idea much faster than human speech.

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