Elon Musk launched Neuralink, a startup that recently hosted a livestream event in which a person suffering from paralysis in all four limbs triumphed in an online chess match. Elon Musk’s brain-chip company, Neuralink, recently shared a live video of a patient who seemed to be playing online chess using just mental orders.
In a video that Neuralink posted on the social networking site X, the company presented Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old man who was the first person to get an implant of their brain-computer interface technology. After mentally imagining moving the cursor on the screen, Arbaugh, who had a diving accident that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down, said that using Neuralink had become “intuitive.”
All in all, I could move the cursor precisely and point it in any direction as I pleased by manipulating it as if I were using a force like “the Force.” Similar to the Jedi characters’ abilities in the Star Wars films, Arbaugh spoke about the first time he was able to control the movement of anything on the screen just by glancing at it. “It really is astounding.”Arbaugh called the device operation “effortless,” and the next day he was allowed to leave the hospital.
In the video, he said, “The amount of excitement I feel for being able to do this is indescribable.” Arbaugh also acknowledged that they had run across some issues and that the technology was not perfect. “I want to make sure that this doesn’t seem like the end of the expedition.” “It has already had a transformative impact on my life, even though there is still a significant amount of work left to do,” he said.
In 2016, Musk, one of the Neuralink co-founders, claimed on X that his company has effectively shown “telepathy” by allowing a someone to operate a computer just with their thoughts. A comment request was not immediately answered by Neuralink.
After around three years, a video showing a monkey utilizing its brain to play the computer game Pong was made public by Neuralink. Neuralink is not the first company to use an implant to allow a patient to control a computer with their mind.
Australian startup Synchron successfully installed its device in a patient in July 2022, bypassing the requirement for skull incisions with a less invasive process.
