Watch Neuralink’s first brain chip patient play chess with his mind

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain chip startup, live-streamed its first patient implanted with a chip to use his brain to play chess on Wednesday.

Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident, plays chess on his laptop and uses a Neuralink device to move the cursor. The implant is designed to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

Musk said last month that Abo received an implant from the company in January that allows him to control a computer mouse with his thoughts.

“The surgery was very simple,” Abo said of the implant in a video played on Musk’s social media platform X. “I was discharged from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairment.

“I basically gave up on playing this game,” Arbaugh said of Civilization VI. “You (Neuralink) gave me the ability to play it again, and I played it for eight hours straight.”

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Abo said it was “not perfect” and “had some issues.”

“I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot to do, but it has changed my life,” he added.

Kip Ludwig, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Neural Engineering Program, said what Neuralink demonstrated was not a “breakthrough.”

“It’s still early days post-implantation and a lot of learning needs to happen on both the Neuralink side and the subject side to maximize the amount of control information that can be achieved,” he added.

Even so, Ludwig said it’s a positive development for patients because they’ll be able to interact with computers in ways they couldn’t before the implants. “It’s certainly a good starting point,” he said.

Last month, Reuters reported that U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record-keeping and quality control of animal experiments at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a day after the startup said it had been cleared to test its brains on humans. The implants were less than a month old. Neuralink did not respond to questions about the FDA inspection at the time.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

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