Silicon Valley’s ambitious new bet: Brain ‘modems’ that restore sight, hearing, and speech
SAN JOSE, Calif. — In a warehouse district here, a few young engineers fueled by ramen and energy bars are inventing the future of mind reading.
Paradromics has big ambitions: It wants to squeeze a device the size of a mobile phone into a chip small enough to insert into a human brain, where it would “read” nerve signals and replace senses and abilities lost due to injury or diseases.
For now, the startup’s recently minted Ph.D.s are working in a small warren of scruffy offices and labs to perfect a stuffed-mouse mockup. You’d never guess that it won an $18 million Pentagon contract last month, vaulting it into the top ranks of Silicon Valley companies surging into the field of brain-machine interfaces.
It joins such titans as Facebook and Tesla’s Elon Musk, and the valley’s growing interest in neuroscience has generated considerable excitement that brain interface products will some day let the blind see, the deaf hear, and patients with ALS speak — Paradromics’s initial focus. But these are early days, and there are huge technical challenges ahead, as well as safety, privacy, and ethical considerations facing tech companies not used to
