Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain chip startup, livestreamed its first patient implanted with a chip playing online chess.
Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, was playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.
He received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse with his thoughts, Musk said last month.
“The surgery was super easy,” Arbaugh said in the video posted on Musk’s X social media platform, referring to the implantation procedure. “I literally walked out of the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive deficit.
“I had pretty much given up on that game,” Arbaugh said, referring to the Civilization VI game, “all of you (Neuralink) gave me the opportunity to do that again and I played for eight hours straight.”
Kip Ludwig, former director of the neural engineering program at the US National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a “breakthrough”.
“We are still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be obtained,” he added.
Despite this, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient to be able to interface with a computer in a way that was not possible before the implant. “It’s certainly a good place to start,” he said.
Last month, Reuters reported that U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with recordkeeping and quality controls for animal testing at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, less than a month later that the startup said it had been approved to test its brain implants on humans.
Neuralink did not respond to questions about the FDA inspection at the time.