Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink has revealed its first human patient to be implanted with its first product, through a video livestream on X of the individual moving a mouse and playing computer chess through a brain implant.
Twenty nine-year-old Noland Arbaugh is the the first person implanted with Neuralink’s “Telepathy,” a brain-computer interface (BCI), that looks to help patients with severe paralysis control external technology — like a laptop or smartphone — using only neural signals. In the Wednesday night livestream, Arbaugh said he became a quadrapalegic after a diving incident some eight years ago.
Arbaugh said he was released from the hospital the day after the procedure. Since then, Arbaugh said he has been able to do things he wasn’t previously able to, including playing online chess and the video game Civilization VI.
Though Arbaugh called the surgery “super easy,” he expanded about the experience later. “It’s not perfect, I would say that we have run into some issues,” Arbaugh said. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life.”
Musk announced Neuralink in 2017, stating its mission is to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs” through its implantable brain chips. The surgery involves attaching the implant, called the “Link,” directly to the brain to read neural signals. Wires from the device are meant to monitor the patient’s brain activity and use electricity to stimulate certain areas of the brain.
Last month, Musk revealed that a then-unknown human patient had “made a full recovery” and can “move a mouse around the screen just by thinking.” His public comments came roughly a month after the implant was first installed in the patient’s head; Musk at the time said Arbaugh was “recovering well.”
Musk went on a victory lap after the video aired Wednesday night, agreeing with an X user who called Neuralink’s Telepathy a “species level game changer” and looking ahead to “Blindsight,” a hypothetical product that could cure blindness by beaming “direct vision to the brain.”
He also insisted that “[l]ong-term, it is possible to shunt the signals from the brain motor cortex past the damaged part of the spine to enable people to walk again and use their arms normally,” using Telepathy.
But Neuralink is not without controversy. More than a thousand animals were killed in the course of the startup’s rushed trials, which led to accusations of “grotesque” animal abuse and a lawsuit from a physicians group. Neuralink now claims its operations are safe, and it received federal approval from regulators in May 2023.