A paralyzed man was introduced as the first user of billionaire Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip implant and is able to play chess online, seemingly by way of telepathy.
Meet Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old who was in a "freak diving accident" in 2016, leaving him without sensation or control beyond his shoulders. He returned to his parents' home after a having been a self-reliant college student and felt like a burden.
In the same year, Elon Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup. Telepathy, their investigational device, is a brain-computer interface (BCI), which converts brain signals for movement into computer commands. Arbaugh, who became its first recipient in January of this year, simply has to think of moving the cursor on his laptop screen for it to move.
"I love playing chess, and so this is one of the things that y'all have enabled me to do, something that I wasn't able to do much the last few years. Especially not like this. I had to use a mouth stick and stuff, but now it's all being done by my brain," he said in a live video on X, formerly Twitter.
— Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024
The innovation, which appears novel, is not a big technical leap, according to some reports. In 2004, a similar brain chip implant was administered to a paralyzed patient, as well.
Although the Neuralink implant has some issues and its clinical trial is yet to be completed, Arbaugh said the technology has been life-changing for him.
