The first patient of Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been presented to the public. Noland Arbaugh had all but given up playing Civilization VI ever since a diving accident dislocated two vertebrae in his cervical spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down.
When confined to his wheel chair, the 29-year-old American is totally dependent on the care of his parents, who need to shift his weight ever few hours to avoid pressure sores from sitting too long in the same position.
Moving a cursor on a display furthermore required the use of a mouth stick, a specialized assistive device used by quadriplegics.
After becoming the first human to undergo a brain chip implant by Musk’s Neuralink, however, he claims to have gained the ability to control a computer with his mind.
The first thing Arbaugh then says he did was stay up all night until 6 a.m. playing Sid Meier’s epic strategy game.
“Now I can literally just lie in bed and play to my heart’s content. Honestly, the biggest restriction at this point was having to wait for the implant to charge once I used all of it,” he said in a video testimonial Neuralink uploaded to its official channel on X on Wednesday.
Long-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
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2024
If true, that marks a major advancement for Musk’s company.
Only a few years ago, Neuralink’s big news was showing audio beeps that supposedly were made through brain signals captured by swine that had the chip implants.
Neuralink has often been viewed as a laggard in the emerging field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Its two main competitors, Blackrock Microsystems and Synchron, already have shown what appear to be similar successes with their technology.
‘It was like using the Force’
The news caps a busy seven days for Musk’s business empire, including the third test launch of his Starship rocket and the release of version 12.3 of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, which met with wide-scale praise among many U.S. owners.
“Big week,” the entrepreneur concurred on Wednesday.
Musk had previously spoken of this patient, but until now, no one outside the company knew who the individual was, if the claims of success could be trusted and whether any complications resulted from the procedure.
Videos with patient testimonials are a step change from Musk’s one-sentence tweets on X.
Arbaugh himself explained he made a full recovery since being released from hospital the day after the surgery, and praised the moment when he began to gain some measure of control using only his brainwaves.
“It was like using the Force on a cursor and I could get it to move wherever I wanted, just stare somewhere on the screen and it would move where I want it to,” Arbaugh said, “which was such a wild experience the first time it happened.”
Can we believe Neuralink’s claims?
Yet while such testimony lends a lot more credibility to Neuralink’s claims, the company retains precise control over everything you see and hear.
In several instances, the video appears to cut away abruptly, for example.
As a result, the brief nine-minute is not comparable to published peer-reviewed research nor traditional media briefings in which executives respond to questions on the spot in a format they cannot edit, crop or otherwise alter after the fact.
In January, Musk posted a video of Tesla’s Optimus in which the humanoid robot was shown folding laundry seemingly on its own.
Careful observers noticed however that a human hand was briefly visible at the edge of the frame, revealing the operator was in control of the movements.
The Tesla CEO then admitted his robot could not yet autonomously perform the task.
Neuralink has not published a single peer-reviewed research study—unusual in the health industry even for a privately-held company.
Thus far the greatest seal of approval it has received was the greenlight by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to launch its first human trial.
For now, patient Arbaugh said that while there are some hiccups with the brain chip he has in his head, he has already picked out his costume for Halloween: he’s going to dress up as Professor X, the wheelchair-bound telepath from Marvel’s popular superhero comics.
“Every day it seems like we’re learning new stuff,” he beamed.
