Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink live-streamed its first patient implanted with a chip using his mind to play online chess.
Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident eight years ago, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.
“It’s crazy, it really is. It’s so cool,” said Arbaugh, who joked about having telepathy thanks to Musk’s startup.
How does it work?
Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.
“The surgery was super easy,” Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk’s social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure.
Arbaugh said he was released from the hospital a day after the device was implanted in his brain, and that he had no cognitive impairment as a result.
“There is a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life,” he said. “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey.”
He told of starting out by thinking about moving the cursor and eventually the implant system mirrored his intent.
“The reason I got into it was because I wanted to be part of something that I feel is going to change the world,” he said.
Arbaugh said he plans to dress up this Halloween as Marvel Comics X-Men character Charles Xavier, who is wheelchair-bound but possesses mental superpowers.
“I’m going to be Professor X,” he said. “I think that’s pretty fitting… I’m basically telekinetic.”
Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a “breakthrough.”
“It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject’s side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved,” he added.
‘Really crazy, impressive and scary all at once’
Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient that they have been able to interface with a computer in a way they were not able to before the implant. “It’s certainly a good starting point,” he said.
A Neuralink engineer in the video, which was posted on X and Reddit, promised more updates regarding the patient’s progress.
“I knew they started doing this with human patients, but it’s another level to actually see the person who has one in,” one Reddit user commented.
“Really crazy, impressive and scary all at once.”
Neuralink’s technology works through a device about the size of five stacked coins that is placed inside the human brain through invasive surgery.
The startup, cofounded by Musk in 2016, aims to build direct communication channels between the brain and computers.
The ambition is to supercharge human capabilities, treat neurological disorders like ALS or Parkinson’s, and maybe one day achieve a symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.
Musk is hardly alone in trying to make advances in the field, which is officially known as brain-machine or brain-computer interface research.
