Neuroscience startup Neuralink is on a mission to develop next-generation brain implants that hook machines up to the human mind, and on Friday founder Elon Musk offered a look at the team’s progress. The company’s latest computer chip was demonstrated in the brain of a pig, where it was used to broadcast the animals’ neural activity in real-time as it waddled around a pen.

Neuralink broke cover last July, showing off a small chip called N1 a couple of years after Musk first began sharing his ambitions in the space. This device featured an array of tiny and flexible threads that could be sewn into human brain tissue to monitor its electrical signals.

his type of device is known as a brain-computer interface, and scientists have been developing these and exploring their potential now for decades. Monitoring electrical signals from the brain and decoding them for different purposes could open up all kinds of possibilities, from allowing paralyzed people to regain control of their limbs, to the treatment of conditions like depression and chronic pain.

These types of devices could intervene in these types of conditions, not just by monitoring the electrical signals traveling from neurons to the brain, but by correcting the ones that are breaking down.

However, the brain-computer interfaces currently used in medical research are bulky, offer relatively low bandwidth, often need to be tethered to other machines and involve complex surgeries to implant. Neuralink, Musk hopes, can one day offer something more suitable for mainstream use that can relay much more information about activity in the brain, and be implanted through a procedure no more complicated than laser eye surgery.

Last year, Musk showed off a Neuralink system consisting of a sensor that sat behind the ear and connected to electrodes on the surface of the brain. Twelve months on, the team has now reduced this system to a singular device the size of a coin. This would replace a piece of skull, with very fine wires then used to monitor electrical activity in the surrounding tissue.

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