Billionaire Elon Musk’s brain chip startup released images on Friday that appear to show a monkey playing a simple video game after receiving implants of the new technology.
Neuralink’s three-minute video shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on either side of his brain, playing Mind Pong. Although he was trained to move a controller, he is now unplugged and controls the paddle just thinking of moving his hand up or down.
“Neuralink’s first product will allow someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone who uses their thumbs,” Musk tweeted Thursday.
“Later versions will be able to derive signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in clusters of motor / sensory neurons in the body, thus allowing paraplegics to walk again, for example. The device is implanted flush with the skull and wirelessly charged. , so that you look and feel totally normal, “he added.
Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey’s motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the video’s voiceover indicated.
“Using this data, we calibrated the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between the neural activity patterns and the different joystick movements they produce,” he noted.
Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and spinal cord injuries, as well as fuse humanity with the artificial intelligence.
Musk has a history of bringing together diverse experts to develop technology that was previously limited to academic labs, including rockets and electric vehicles, through companies like Tesla Inc and SpaceX.