Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old man who was paralyzed from the neck down in a freak diving accident 8 years ago, is the first patient to have a chip implanted in his brain by Elon’s company Neuralink Musk. The company showed in a video that the patient is able to move a computer cursor with just thought. The company broadcast live on Wednesday night how the man played a game of computer chess in which he could control the computer with his mind.
Elon Musk already announced in February that his company had achieved this milestone. After a little more than a month, Arbaugh appeared publicly and offered some impressions about his operation: “The surgery was super easy. I literally left the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairment.”
Arbaugh explained that since his accident he had not been able to play the game Civilization VI and that Neuralink had made it possible for him to return. “They gave me the ability to play again and I was there for 8 hours straight”, indicated the patient. Reuters reported last month that inspectors from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had detected problems with record-keeping and quality controls on animal experiments at Neuralink less than a month ago. after the company said it had permission to test its brain implants on humans. The company did not then respond to the agency’s questions about the FDA inspection.
Neuralink’s chip is about the size of a coin and has 1,024 electrodes thinner than a human hair that connect to the brain and has a battery that can be recharged wirelessly from the outside using an inductive charger, just like this type of charging in cellphones .
Elon Musk’s company’s Telepathy device, described as a “brain-computer interface,” has a series of chips and other advanced electronic components that process neural signals from the implanted brain and transmit them by radio to a app. The mobile phone application is linked to a receiver that is connected to the computer via a cable and in this way transforms thought into computer actions.
“There’s still a lot to do, but it’s already changed my life,” said Arbaugh, who joked that he felt like he could use the force, the telekinesis power from the Star movies. wars.
“The reason I joined this project is that I wanted to be a part of something that I believe will change the world,” Arbaugh said. Neuralink already showed a similar experiment last year in a monkey that, with a chip in its brain, could also play a video game with thought.
Neuralink’s implants are placed in the brain using a proprietary precision surgical robot. His goal through brain implants is to solve medical problems that have no solution today, such as getting people with paraplegia to walk again, restore sight to the blind and cure psychiatric illnesses such as depression.
