Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, just released a YouTube video of a monkey navigating an on-screen cursor with its mind.
The 9-year-old macaque monkey, Pager, was wired up with chips six weeks before the video was shot.
The video narrator explained that the Neuro links have the capacity to record from more than 2000 electrodes implanted in the regions of the Monkey’s motor cortex that coordinate his hand and arm movements.
“By recording from many neurons and feeding their activity into a decoder algorithm, we are able to predict Pager’s intended hand movements in real-time”, he added.
After the Monkey had learnt the pattern of movement the joystick is immediately removed or disconnected from the computer. Pager appears to go on playing the game with his mind (that is, without the joystick).
It’s believable that a monkey might play video games using a brain implant — after all, a paralyzed man has already used a robotic arm and a non-Neuralink brain implant to drink beer.
Musk shared on Twitter that Neuralink might let a paralyzed person tweet faster than anyone using their fingers. A later goal, he said in a follow-up tweet, will be to send signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in major body neural clusters, “thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again.”
Neuralink is a team of exceptionally talented people. They are creating the future of brain interfaces: building devices now that will help people with paralysis and inventing new technologies that will expand our abilities, our community, and our world.
