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Do you believe in telepathy? How about telekinesis? What about “The Force?” You might now after a paralyzed patient was live-streamed playing chess using nothing but his brain thanks to Elon Musk’s controversial, yet groundbreaking Neuralink computer-linked chip.
Back in September of 2023, Musk revealed that Neuralink was on the lookout for human test subjects for their chip.
Medical experts warned at the time that any volunteers “should have serious concerns.”
The in January, Elon Musk announced without much fanfare that Neuralink had found a volunteer and had successfully implanted their brain chip into him. That announcement too came with its fair share of critics.
Fast forward to this week and Neuralink had their subject, Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old with quadriplegia, perform a demonstration in a live-stream in which he played chess on a computer using just his brain and the company’s device appropriately named “Telepathy.”
“I love playing chess, so this is one of the things that you all have enabled me to do. I wasn’t able to really do much the last few years, especially not like this,” Arbaugh said in the video. “I had to use my mouth, but now it’s all being done with my brain.”
“We started out trying a few different things. We basically went from … differentiating imagined movement vs attempted movement. So a lot of what we started out with was attempting to move. I would attempt to move, say, my right hand left right forward back,” he explained in the video.
“From there, I think it just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving. Just stare somewhere at the screen and it would move where I wanted to, which was such a wild experience.”
Arbaughn said the experience was like using “The Force” from Star Wars and that he now plans to dress up in costume as Professor X for Halloween.
“It’s not perfect. I would say that we have run into some issues,” said Arbaugh. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done. But it has already changed my life.”