Elon Musk’s brain chip startup Neuralink demonstrated on Wednesday its first patient who was implanted with a chip that can use the power of thought to play online chess.
Neuralink: playing chess with the power of thought
Noland Arbeau, a 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed from the shoulder down after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor with the help of a Neuralink device. The implant aims to allow people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.
Last month, Musk said that Arbo received the implant from the company in January and can control a computer mouse with his thoughts.
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“The surgery was extremely easy,” Arbo said in a video broadcast on Musk’s social media platform X, referring to the implantation procedure. “I was literally discharged from the hospital a day later. I don’t have any cognitive impairment. I almost quit playing this game,” Arbeau said, referring to the game Civilization VI, “you all (Neuralink) gave me the opportunity to do it again, and I played for 8 hours straight.
Speaking about his experience with the new technology, Arbeau said it is “not perfect” and they have “run into some problems.” “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the road, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s already changed my life,” he added.
Kip Ludwig, former director of the neural engineering program at the US National Institutes of Health, said that what Neuralink showed was not a “breakthrough”.
“It’s still the very early days after implantation, and there is a lot of learning to be done on both the Neuralink and patient side to maximize the amount of control information that can be achieved,” he added. Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient to be able to interact with the computer in a way that was not possible before the implant. “It’s definitely a good starting point,” he said.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/
