Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows paralysed patient playing chess using brain implant

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's brain-chip company, Neuralink, has demonstrated how its first patient who underwent brain implant surgery recently is doing. Neuralink released a nine-minute video showing its first human patient using the brain implant to control a mouse cursor and he was also seen playing chess with nothing but a moving cursor via a brain chip in his mind.

The first trial of the brain implant was conducted in January 2024. Before that, Neuralink had conducted the trial on a monkey, who was shown controlling an on-screen cursor to play the video game Pong following the successful implant.

In the latest video, the 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who says he met with a diving accident about eight years ago, can be seen moving the cursor by just staring at the computer screen. Arbaugh, who was left completely paralysed below the shoulders post the accident, terms the experience like the movie "Star War".

Sharing the video of Arbaugh, Elon Musk termed it "telepathy". "Livestream of @Neuralink demonstrating “Telepathy” – controlling a computer and playing video games just by thinking."

Arbaugh said he can’t even describe how cool it is to be able to do what he can do after the implant. "I love playing chess and this is something you all have enabled me to do...I was not able to really do much in last few years, especially not like this, I have used like a mouth stick but now it's all being done with my brain. You all can see the cursor moving around the screen. That's all me. It's pretty cool," Arbaugh can be heard saying via the video.

During the demonstration of the Neuralink brain chip, Arbaugh can be heard saying his surgery was "super easy". He said post the surgery, he played the video game Civilization VI for eight hours straight, and he halted playing the game because he had to charge the implant.

Arbaugh, however, admits that there's still a lot of work to be done; he ran into "some issues", he confessed while adding that the device has already changed his life for good.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had permitted Neuralink to conduct first-in-human clinical trials for its brain implant in January 2024. During a brain-implant surgery, the Neuralink's device is put inside the brain using a surgical robot. Once implanted, it is not visible cosmetically.

Billionaire Elon Musk founded Neuralink in 2016. It works on a system called a brain-computer interface, which captures brain signals and allows a paralysed person to control a cursor using thoughts. Until now, Neuralink had refrained from sharing details about the progress of the study, but the latest video seems a step forward. Musk had recently said that the patient who underwent brain implant surgery had recovered fully, with no ill effects.

A section of experts have also criticised Neuralink for the lack of transparency regarding the trials, though Neuralink says it is "striving to do the highest quality, most robust, and truly innovative scientific research".