I don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but Gabe Newell, the guy from Valve, is diving into brain chips. Yeah, like actual brain-computer interfaces. His company, Starfish Neuroscience, just threw out this announcement about a snazzy new chip. Imagine tiny neural chips doing their thing in your brain. Weird, right?
Anyway, so they’re cooking up this low-power chip, teaming up with some R&D giants called imec—potentially changing how we deal with brain disorders. They wanna create these implants that can chit-chat with different parts of your brain at once. Newell’s been yammering about ‘read and write’ brain stuff for ages. I’m not entirely sure how that feels, or if I even want to know… but it sounds wild.
Picture this: a chip you can barely see—like 2 by 4 millimeters or something. You never thought you’d be reading a chip spec from Gabe, did you? I mean, he’s all about games and now this? Bonkers.
Okay, here’s the scoop. This tiny bugger runs on super low power, records brain spikes or whatever, and even stimulates neurons. All off this little microchip package. 32 electrode sites! Who knew our brains were all about connections like this? And get this, it processes data on its own to keep things wireless—pretty sci-fi, huh? They made it using some 55nm tech, whatever the heck that means.
So, the timeline here is kinda vague. They’re looking for partners who wanna play around—experiment with wireless power kinds of stuff. Think this means by 2025 we could have these brain chips zipping about? Nuts.
Oh, and Newell’s been talking about how this tech goes beyond just medical uses. Think “The Matrix,” which is a bit dramatic, but hey, if you’re going dream big…
And here’s a good bit: this thing is somehow easier to plug into your motor cortex than make you feel cold. Your brain’s got these easy-access ports for some things, apparently? Like our brains have USB ports or something. Meanwhile, temperature’s tied up in immune responses. Who’d have thunk?
And Mike Ambinder, he was at Valve—gave this GDC talk in 2019 about brain stuff in gaming. Measuring how players react to games, seems like nerds’ paradise, right? He’s hopeful about what we can learn from the brain for game design.
Big thanks to Brad ‘SadlyItsBradley’ Lynch for pointing out this madness. More brainy fun ahead!
