Galen Buckwalter didn’t hesitate to get a craniotomy in 2024 as part of a brain implant study at Caltech. The 69-year-old research psychologist wanted to contribute to cutting-edge science that could help other people with paralysis.

Buckwalter has been a quadriplegic since a diving accident at age 16 left him paralyzed from the chest down. The six chips in his brain, made by Blackrock Neurotech, read activity from his neurons and decode movement intention. They enable him to operate a computer with his thoughts, feel sensation in his fingers that he had lost, and, more recently, make music with his mind.

Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, the technology is being developed by Paradromics, Synchron, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and others to restore communication and movement in people with severe motor disabilities. But Buckwalter’s experience shows that the technology can be used in ways that are not purely functional—for instance, as an outlet for creative expression. Other BCI recipients are using their implants to make digital art with their thoughts. A 2023 gallery exhibit at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, displayed works by BCI recipients Nathan Copeland, James Johnson, and Jan Scheuermann.

Buckwalter has been working with Caltech graduate student Sean Darcy, who developed an algorithm that allows him to create musical tones on a computer with his thoughts. Buckwalter, a longtime musician with the Los Angeles-based punk rock band Siggy, has used some of the tones he has composed in the lab in a song called “Wirehead,” also the name of the band’s latest album released on March 15.

WIRED spoke with Buckwalter about what it’s like to make music with his mind. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: You recently started using your implant to produce musical tones. How did that come about?

Galen Buckwalter: Even before I was implanted, I saw this clip that was going around YouTube of mushrooms, where if you put electrodes on mushrooms you get this biosonification. It will amplify the electrical activity going on in a mushroom, and you get these really cool sounds. I saw that and thought, if a mushroom can chirp like that, I want to know what my brain sounds like. That was something that was on my agenda that I wanted to do with the Caltech team. From day one, I was talking to all the researchers about it, and this amazing grad student, Sean Darcy, heard about it. He spent his time on weekends and nights coming up with this software that translates what I think into the ability to manipulate tones.

So you’re able to create musical tones just by thinking. How does that work?

Each neuron has a baseline firing rate. All these neurons are firing to some extent, but what we do is identify neurons that I have volitional control of. My six implants each have 64 independent channels to record from, and we have a big screen with all 384 channels on it. So, if I think about moving my toe up and down, a bunch of channels will light up. There seems to be a directional set of neurons that it picks up from just the extension and flexion of my toe.

What Sean does is he assigns a tone to the baseline firing rate. If I activate that neuron, the pitch will go up, and if I suppress it, it will come back down. I think about moving my index finger, and then think about moving my pinky, and I can do that for as many channels as I have volitional control over. Right now I can do two tones at once, but if you go above that it starts to feel like you’re rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time.

One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.”

But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended rather than coming to complete stops, as the law requires.

In early December, Waymo even issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers with the self-driving vehicle company had “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks before.

But even after the recall, the school-bus-passing incidents continued, according to school officials and a report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety watchdog that’s also investigating the situation.

Now, email and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths that the Austin public school district and Waymo went to try to solve the problem. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in a school parking lot in mid-December, the documents show, with several employees pulling together school buses and stop-arm signals from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information related to vehicles and their flashing lights.

Still, by mid-January, over a month later, the school district reported at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place in Austin. “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people that receive one violation do not receive another,” an official with the school’s police department told the local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it does not appear the Waymo automated driver system is learning through its software updates, its recall, what have you, because we are still having violations.”

The situation raises questions about the self-driving technologies’ curious blind spots and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they’ve been spotted.

Self-driving software has long struggled with recognizing flashing emergency lights and road safety devices with long, thin arms, including gates and stop-arms, says Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to the NHTSA during the Biden administration. “If [the company] didn’t fix this a few years ago, the more they drive, the more it’s going to be a problem,” she says. “That’s exactly what’s happening here.”

Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. A spokesperson for the NTSB declined to answer WIRED’s questions while its investigation continues.

Illegal Passing

By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of the 19 incidents alleged by a lawyer for the district in a letter later released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo passed a school bus letting off children “only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road.”

“Alarmingly,” the lawyer wrote, five of the alleged incidents had occurred after Waymo had assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the problem. Federal regulators with the NHTSA had already launched a probe into the behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all potential legal remedies at its disposal and intends to take whatever action is necessary to protect the safety of its students, if required,” the lawyer warned.

Cars didn’t always have steering wheels. The very first car—the 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen, invented by Karl Benz—used a tiller system: a horizontal bar with a handle mounted to a vertical bar. The lever-like handle was similar in many respects to a boat’s rudder. Amazingly, it would be another nine years before French engineer Alfred Vacheron saw sense and fitted the first known steering wheel to his 4-horsepower Panhard for the Paris-Rouen race. Just four years later, in 1898, Panhard made the infinitely preferable and safer steering wheel standard on all its cars. And we’ve been using them ever since.

Hans-Peter Wunderlich is Mercedes’ creative director of interior design. He has been designing steering wheels for 35 years. “I started in 1991 on my first,” he tells me. “A steering wheel is really the most challenging and difficult element to sculpture, to design, to develop in the car.” It is so difficult that Wunderlich has used the wheel as a test on potential recruits.

“When we hire a designer, I have given them the task, after I see a nice portfolio, to draw me a steering wheel,” he says. “The steering wheel is, for me, the proof. Should I hire them or not? If a designer is able to create a perfect steering wheel, even just as a scribble, then they will be a good designer for the total interior of a car.”

It was this challenge, in part, that attracted Ive and his team. “Our starting point was trying to understand the essential nature of the problem to be solved, and that normally means dismissing received wisdom,” Ive tells me. “A car is the aggregation of multiple products, and, in many ways, we’re designing furniture. We’re designing complex and sophisticated input methods. One of the challenges was to try to create cohesion. You don’t get something to be cohesive by a set of rules. That was a wonderful new challenge, and one wrestled with over a number of years.”

For both Ive and Wunderlich, science accompanies the art of design. They talk of the intricacies of the ergonomics, the logic of the switches, factoring in an “exploding element in the center” (the airbag), which is getting more and more complicated, says Wunderlich. “Even the rim is an ergonomic science in itself,” he adds, saying that his team works hand in glove with Mercedes’ in-house ergonomics department on these stages. “It’s almost 50-50. We get requirements data from engineering and ergonomics.”

Spinning Out

Look closely at your steering wheel rim; in cross-section, it won’t be round. Cut it into segments, and each will likely have a different profile, aiming to optimize grip wherever your hands grasp the wheel. Even the padding has to be just right. “It mustn’t be like bone but also not too fat. You need a nice balance,” Wunderlich says. “[It must say] this car is solid, it’s quality, it’s strong, it’s powerful, but it’s not crude.”

“If you hold the wheel on the three and nine o’clock positions, you can carve in with your fingers on the rear of the rim—so you have the hump, the scallop of the rim,” Wunderlich says. “And then we carve into a valley where your fingers could rest. That means your hands can close. You have the feeling you’re holding the car. This is so challenging, because in that area you have such a technical structure to maintain—complex electronics and heating elements. We torture the engineers to keep that area so small so we can sculpt it out.”

Ive tortured Raffaele De Simone, Ferrari’s chief engineer and head development driver. De Simone is sometimes described at the company as “Customer No. 1” because, apparently, no Ferrari road car leaves the factory until he is satisfied with its performance.