Musk’s Neuralink brain chip allows paralysed patient to play chess

Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink has demonstrated the power of its brain-chip implant by livestreaming its first patient using only his mind to play online chess.

Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old patient who was paralysed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor with his brain using the Neuralink device implanted in January. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

Noland Arbaugh demonstrates how to control his game with thoughts using only the Neuralink brain-chip on Thursday.Credit: Neuralink/X

“The surgery was super easy,” Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk’s social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. “I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments.

“I had basically given up playing that game,” Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilisation VI, “you all [Neuralink] gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight.”

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said it was “not perfect” and they “have run into some issues”.

“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,” he added.

Elon Musk is making big promises about his medical start-up.Credit: AP

Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a breakthrough.

“It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject’s side to maximise the amount of information for control that can be achieved,” he added.

Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient that they have been able to interface with a computer in a way they were unable to before the implant. “It’s certainly a good starting point,” he said.

Last month, Reuters reported that the US Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in humans. Neuralink did not respond then to questions about the FDA’s inspection.

Reuters