Controls mouse with mind
Neuralink patient with a chip in his brain plays chess
March 21, 2024, 6:44 a.m
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In January, Musk’s start-up Neuralink implanted a computer chip into the brain of a person for the first time. The operation was successful – now the patient is making further progress: the 29-year-old shows himself playing online chess via live stream. He moves the mouse with his thoughts.
The first patient to have a computer chip implanted in the brain by Tesla boss Elon Musk’s start-up company Neuralink is apparently making progress in controlling a computer mouse with his thoughts. The 29-year-old patient, who is paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, was seen in a live stream on Musk’s social media platform X playing online chess on his laptop and moving the mouse cursor with his thoughts.
“The surgery was super easy,” the patient said in the video. He was discharged from the hospital one day after the implantation and has no cognitive impairment. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there is still a lot to do, but it has already changed my life,” he said, referring to some problems with the new technology.
In February, Musk announced that the surgery was successful and the patient was able to move a mouse across the screen just by thinking. What Neuralink has shown is not a “breakthrough,” said Kip Ludwig, former program director for neurotechnology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “We are still in the very early stages post-implantation, and both Neuralink and subjects still have a lot to learn to maximize the amount of information available for control,” he added.
Nevertheless, it is a good starting point and a positive development for patients that they can communicate with a computer in a way that was not possible for them before the implantation. Less than a month before the brain implants were approved for human testing, inspectors from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found problems with Neuralink’s records and quality control of animal experiments. Neuralink did not respond to questions about the FDA inspection at the time.