(Reuters) – Neuralink, Elon Musk’s startup specializing in brain chips, broadcast live footage on Wednesday of its first patient implanted with a brain chip managing to play chess online with their thoughts.
Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old quadriplegic patient in whose brain a chip was implanted in January, was able to play chess on his laptop, moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.
The company said the original purpose of the implant was to allow people to control a cursor or computer keyboard with thought.
Elon Musk said last month that Noland Arbaugh had managed to control a computer mouse with his mind.
“The operation was super easy,” Noland Arbaugh said in the video broadcast on the social network X (formerly Twitter). “I literally left the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairment.”
“I had pretty much given up on playing this game,” he added, referring to the Civilization VI video game. “You (Neuralink) gave me the opportunity to do it again and I played for 8 hours straight.”
Noland Arbaugh, however, said that Neuralink’s technology was “not perfect” and that they had “encountered some issues.”
“The story is not over, there is still a lot of work to do, but it has already changed my life,” he said.
Kip Ludwig, former program director for neuroengineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said the results presented by Neuralink did not represent a “major discovery.”
“We are still in the very early days post-implementation, and there is much to learn, both on the Neuralink side and on the subject side, to maximize the amount of control information that can be obtained,” he said. he added.
Kip Ludwig, however, said it was a positive development that the patient was able to communicate with a computer in a way that was previously impossible. “It’s certainly a good place to start,” he said.
Last month, Reuters reported that FDA inspectors found problems with record-keeping and quality control of animal experiments at Neuralink.
(Surbhi Misra, Shivani Tanna, Nilutpal Timsina and Marisa Taylor; Camille Raynaud)
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