Noland Arbaugh had a brain implanted in January by Elon Musk’s neurotechnology business.
Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, Neuralink, announced that it has resolved a problem that significantly limited the first patient’s ability to control a computer cursor.
Noland Arbaugh, the business’s first human test subject, had a brain implanted in January by Musk’s neurotechnology company, which the billionaire CEO of Tesla and X praised as a success.
Eight years ago, a diving accident left Arbaugh paralyzed from the shoulders down.
He described playing chess, playing the videogame “Civilization,” and learning Japanese and French by using his brain to control a computer cursor shortly after the implant procedure.
The threads are a crucial signal-collection component of Neuralink’s device, which goes into the human brain during invasive surgery and is roughly the size of five stacked coins.
Threads linking Arbaugh’s brain to the implant recently “retracted… resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes” and the patient’s capacity to use the cursor, according to a company blog post published on Wednesday.
The business stated that the changes were done to increase the implant’s responsiveness to neurological signals, but it did not provide an explanation for the hiding threads.
This “produced a rapid and sustained improvement in bits-per-second, that has now superseded Noland’s initial performance,” along with additional advancements.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to publish the decrease in the implant’s efficiency.
Musk cofounded the company in 2016, with the goal of creating direct neural-computer connection.
One day, it would be possible to develop a symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, as well as boost human talents and heal neurological illnesses like Parkinson’s or ALS.
The formal name for this field of study is brain-machine or brain-computer interface research, and Musk is not the only one attempting to advance it.