Why it’s so hard to develop the right material for brain implants

The brain is soft and squishy, like “a swollen network of gooey gel.” Electronics, on the other hand, tend to be rigid. So designing a brain implant can be tricky, like sticking a plastic fork into a bowl of Jell-O and hoping the fork doesn’t move too much.The first sensor was implanted into the brain of a paralyzed patient in 1998. The past 20 years have seen growing interest in brain-machine interfaces, which are brain implants that can record information from our neurons an