On Wednesday, Elon Musk's brain-chip startup Neuralink live-streamed its first patient, who has been paralyzed below the shoulder for eight years after a diving accident, implanted with a chip playing online chess.
The 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh was seen playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.
Musk Shows Neuralink Subject
Musk claimed last month that Arbaugh could operate a computer mouse with his thoughts after receiving an implant from the company in January.
"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments."
Arbaugh added, referring to the game 'Civilization VI,' that he had basically given up playing that game, but Neuralink allowed him to do that again, and he played for eight hours straight.
Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said Neuralink's findings were not a "breakthrough."
Ludwig said that 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 that can be achieved for control.
However, he still claimed that it was a positive development for the patient, that they could interface with a computer in a way they were not before the implant. "It's certainly a good starting point," he said.
Less than a month after the company announced it was allowed to test its brain implants on humans, Reuters revealed that US Food and Drug Administration inspectors discovered issues with record keeping and quality controls for animal studies at Elon Musk's Neuralink.
Neuralink did not respond to inquiries about the FDA's inspection.
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Arbaugh Thankful to Neuralink Study
Arbaugh talked about how to use the brain-computer interface during the live broadcast. He said that he would attempt to move, say, his right hand left, right, forward, back, and from there, and he think it just became intuitive for him to start imagining the cursor moving.
A Neuralink engineer promised to share more in the next few days, as there were few details throughout the livestream.
The brain-chip patient expressed that he feels lucky to be part of the Neuralink study, and he could not even describe how cool it is to be able to do telepathy.
In a Spaces audio conversation on X, formerly Twitter, Musk responded on February 19 to a question about the subject's condition. He confirmed that progress is good, and the patient seems to have fully recovered with no ill effects.
He added that the patient can move a mouse around the screen just by thinking.
