Moving the mouse with your mind: the man who succeeded thanks to the Neuralink chip implanted in his brain

Expect further updates in the coming months. Meanwhile Neuralink, the bioengineering company led by billionaire Elon Musk, has shown a nine minute video iin which the first patient to receive a brain implant developed by the group interfaces with a PC playing chess and simply activating commands thinking about doing it. The man is called Noland Arbaugh, is 29 years old and has been quadriplegic since eight years due to an accident he had while taking a dip in a lake. He is – or should be – the first to have received this man-machine system christened Telepathy last January and after a few weeks of training, man, previously forced to perform actions with vocal peripherals or using his mouth, can now effectively exploit the power of his thoughts.

The video, viewed tens of millions of times, therefore shows a first – albeit anecdotal, in the sense that it is not yet accompanied by published scientific studies nor is it actually known how many people will be enrolled in the study or what parameters will be evaluated – document on the effectiveness of the system developed by Neuralink. Which in this way joins the small group of biomedical companies, only two others in the world, which have fully developed and then implanted similar brain systems in some patients. The proof that theneural interfaceas Musk has often explained, can return to providing a certain independence in interaction with technological devices, and therefore with the world, to paralyzed people or even provide perspectives for example for blind people.

Arbaugh underwent surgery on January 28 after the US Food and Drug Administration had given authorization to also carry out tests on humans. For years, in fact, not without profound controversy due to the suffering and avoidable deaths of (according to some reports) hundreds of animals, Neuralink has been carrying out brain implantation experiments. For example, they have become sadly and a little disturbingly famous videos of various macaques who play rudimentary video games, shown in the past. The operation was “very simple, I left the hospital the next day”, Noland himself explained in the video, while talking to an engineer from the company and moving the pieces in a chess video game. No one touches or touches the touchpad nor do other peripherals appear visible: «In practice, it is like thinking of using force on the cursor and I am able to move it whenever I want. I just have to stare at something on the screen,” Noland explains in the clip, adding that he can now also play games Civilization VIa title he was very passionate about before the accident, and thanks to his newfound abilities he can learn new foreign languages ​​such as Japanese and French.

«We have a lot of work to do, we still have a lot to learn about the brain, and we ran into problems. I don't want people to think we're at the end of the journey. But it has already changed my life and I want to be part of something that I feel can change the world. There's nothing to be scared about,” added the first Neuralink patient. The system is composed of an external capsule, a battery that can be recharged from the outside, chips responsible for translating brain waves into signals readable by electronic devices, electrodes and wires literally “woven” into a portion of the brain to a robot surgeon equipped with a needle “thinner than a hair”.

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Neuralink implants a chip in the human brain, but the (science fiction) revolution is not there