2024-03-23 05:05:56
Noland Arbaugh received the implant in January
Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink showed its first patient – a paralyzed 29-year-old man who, in addition to moving the computer cursor with the power of his thought, also plays chess online. Live on the social network X, the man and the engineer of the company explained that this is possible thanks to a device implanted in his head.
The video lasts 9 minutes and clearly shows the company’s first patient, Noland Arbaugh, playing chess online.
The man is paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident and received a chip implant in January.
Neuralink’s goal is to connect the human brain to a computer to help treat complex neurological conditions.
“He received an implant from the company in January and can control a computer mouse using his thoughts,” Elon Musk announced last month. Arbaugh himself commented in X that the operation was extremely easy. “Literally a day later I was discharged from the hospital. I don’t have cognitive disabilities,” revealed the young man.
Arbaugh also said that the brain implant has given him the ability to play a favorite video game again, and now he can do it for hours. “I can’t even describe how cool it is to be able to do that,” admits the patient in the video.
He adds that the technology is not perfect and that they have encountered some problems. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey. There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s already changed my life,” Arbaugh said.
Musk, who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, said at X that his company had demonstrated “telepathy” by allowing a person to control a computer “just by thinking”.
Arbaugh’s video comes nearly 3 years after Neuralink published a monkey playing a computer game with its mind. On the occasion of the discovery, Nature magazine explained that the human brain is home to about 86 billion neurons – nerve cells connected to each other by synapses.
Every time we want to move, feel or think, a small electrical impulse is generated and sent from one neuron to another with lightning speed.
Scientists have developed devices that can detect some of these signals—either using a noninvasive helmet placed on the head or via wires implanted in the brain itself. It’s a scientific field that has received millions of research dollars in recent years.
According to Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, what Musk’s startup has shown is still very early stage and cannot be called a breakthrough. Too little time has passed since the chip was implanted in Arbaugh’s brain, he said, so there isn’t enough information to study the benefits or harms.
Last month, Reuters reported that U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors had found record-keeping and quality-control problems for animal experiments at Elon Musk’s Neuralink less than a month after the startup said it had received permission to tests its brain implants on humans.