Is there a monkey business here?
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neuroscience startup, has released a video that appears to show a primate playing Pong using only the power of his mind.
The video, about three and a half minutes long, shows Pager, a nine-year-old macaque monkey who had two wireless neural data recording and transmission devices in his brain about six weeks before the clip was filmed. Pager takes a banana smoothie through a metal straw while using a joystick to maneuver the Pong paddles on the screen, but it turns out that this joystick is not plugged in. The lab claims in a blog post that Pager actually moves the blades with his brain activity using Neuralink implants.
Watch it here:
So how was this set up? Pager has been trained to play video games using a joystick and get a banana smoothie as a reward. And at first, Neuralink’s N1 Link wireless devices recorded which neurons were firing while Pager operated the joystick. Neuralink created a mathematical model of the relationship between the pattern of Pager neural activity and the different joystick movements that this brain activity produced. Then, after the Links learned to predict the movements of Pager’s hands, the joystick disconnected from the game. And while Pager continues to move the joystick out of habit, the brain’s Link devices actually move the cursor across the screen.
So a monkey playing video games with his mind or, as a commentator, “The next video: Donkey Kong plays Donkey Kong,” referring to Nintendo’s iconic game with a large ape throwing barrels.
From the files: Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows the brain-computer interface
The lab hopes to continue developing its brain implants so that one day the devices can help paralyzed people handle computers and mobile devices through their brain activity. Musk, CEO of Tesla TSLA,
shared this mission statement on Twitter TWTR,
Thursday night, tweeting that Neuralink devices could one day help someone with paralysis use a smartphone faster than a non-disabled person using their thumbs.
This is based on previous “mind control” developments, such as a quadriplegic who appeared in Science magazine in 2015 who was able to drink a beer with a mind-controlled robotic arm. And in 2006, a paralyzed man named Matthew Nagle moved a cursor to the computer and also controlled a television set and a robot using only his thoughts through a small sensor implanted in his brain.
In February, Musk said trials with humans at Neuralink could begin as early as this year.