Elon Musk’s neurotechnology startup, Neuralink streamed a video on X/Twitter showing its patient moving a mouse and playing chess on the computer with the help of the company’s brain chip implant.
The 29-year-old patient named Noland Arbaugh is the company’s first human patient to receive the brain chip implant.
Arbaugh said in the video that he met with a diving accident eight years ago which left him paralyzed below the shoulders. He informed the viewers that the brain implant surgery was “super easy” and he was released from the hospital the very next day.
Neuralink’s implant named “telepathy” is a device designed to be implanted in the skull, with ultra-thin wires, connecting it with a region of the brain that controls movement intention.
“It’s not perfect, I would say that we have run into some issues,” Arbaugh commented. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life.”
Speaking about the Neuralink device, Arbaugh said that it allowed him to “just stare somewhere on the screen” to move the cursor wherever he wants. He compared the experience with the Force from the Star Wars franchise.
Arbaugh further said that the implant helped him to play the video game Civilization VI for eight hours straight, though he had to pause in between to charge the device.
Elon Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, shared the video saying that it demonstrated “telepathy”.
The tech startup started recruiting human candidates with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for the trial in September, after receiving a clearance from FDA in May.
Besides Neuralink, several other companies are attempting to link the nervous systems to computers to cure brain disorders and injuries, such as Paradromics, Blackrock Neurotech, Precision Neuroscience, and Synchron, which is the first company to get FDA clearance to test a device in humans in 2021.
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