Reviews are in for Elon Musk’s cyborg brain project

On Tuesday, Elon Musk stood in front of a bunch of people — or brains in vats, if you prefer — and explained his plot to merge man and machine via cranial implant. And, according to experts in the field, Musk’s company looks like it’s off to a promising start.

STAT’s Sharon Begley and Rebecca Robbins talked to researcherswho’ve spent years in pursuit of such a brain-computer interface and, for the most part, they were impressed with what they saw. There were caveats, the largest of which is that “it’s hard to tell what’s aspirational and what they’ve actually done,” said neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a pioneer in the brain-computer world.

Neuralink’s vow to start testing its system in patients by next year may not be realistic, experts said. But hope may spring eternal.

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