(Reuters) – The start of billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s brain chip released images on Friday that show a monkey playing a simple video game after getting implants from the new technology.
The 3-minute video from Neuralink shows here Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of his brain, playing “Mind Pong.” Although he was trained to move a joystick, he is now disconnected. Control the palette simply by thinking of moving your hand up or down.
“The first @Neuralink product will allow someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with the mind faster than someone who uses the thumbs,” Musk posted in a tweet here Thursday.
“Later versions will be able to derive signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in the motor clusters of the body / sensory neurons, thus allowing, for example, paraplegics to walk again. The device is implanted flush with the skull and charged wirelessly, so it looks and feels completely normal.
Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey’s motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the voice-over said in the video.
“Using this data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between the patterns of neuronal activity and the different joystick movements they produce.”
Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain chips to help cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humanity with artificial intelligence.
In August 2020, Musk introduced a pig with a Neuralink chip implant, which he described as “a Fitbit in the skull.”
Musk has a history of bringing together several experts to develop technology previously limited to academic labs, including rockets and electric vehicles, through companies such as Tesla Inc. and SpaceX.
Reuters Television reports; Written by Richard Chang, edited by Rosalba O’Brien