Neuralink, the secret start-up of neurosciences co-founded by Elon Musk, has been even quieter than usual these days. That is, until this week he came out a YouTube video of a monkey appearing to play the classic video game Pong with his mind.
The video stars Pager, a 9-year-old macaque monkey who had a Neuralink implanted on either side of his brain about six weeks earlier, according to the narrator. And apparently, he loves it Pong.
Before learning to play with the mind, however, researchers first conditioned him to use a joystick, rewarding him with “a delicious banana smoothie” through a straw every time he moved a cursor across the screen to certain illuminated squares of a grid.
While maneuvering the joystick and sliding the smoothie, the brain’s Neuralink devices recorded their brain activity, monitoring more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in the region of Pager’s motor cortex that controls hand and arm movements. Researchers could also interact with the devices in real time by pairing their phones via Bluetooth.
Neuralink data was introduced into a “decoding algorithm” to train them to predict the hand movements predicted by Pager in real time based on the neurons firing. After a brief period of calibration, the decoder understood Pager’s neural patterns well enough that the joystick was no longer needed. The narrator says that even with the disconnect, Pager continues to move the cursor using only his mind. Then he seems to be playing a so-called game MindPong no joystick in sight.
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“A monkey literally plays a video game telepathically with a brain chip !!” Musk said a tweet sharing the video on Thursday.
More than four million people have seen it since then and it is currently among the top ten YouTube videos. If you are interested, Neuralink has also shared a video showing how the raw data is behind Pager’s neural activity while he is busy playing.
Musk continued to discuss future plans for Neuralink devices in a series of tweets, echoing the narrator of the video that the ultimate goal of this technology is to allow people with paralysis to operate their computer or phone through their mind.
Early versions of the device “will allow someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with the mind faster than someone who uses the thumbs,” Musk wrote. “Later versions will be able to derive signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in the body’s sensory motor / neural clusters, allowing, for example, paraplegics to walk again.”
In August, however, Neuralink showed a live demonstration of the Neuralink implant in action about pigs instead of monkeys.
“It’s like a Fitbit in the skull with small wires,” Musk said at the time.
Musk is proraised a lot of science fiction uses Neuralink research since the company’s launch in 2017. They have ranged from more practical examples such as the treatment of brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and depression and the aforementioned mobility assistance for paralyzed people, to to the fantastic, that is, to increase our human brain functions so that we can coexist happily with our eventual AI lords.
Before all this can happen, however, Neuralink will have to jump through a series of regulatory hoops if it ever wants to have the chance to become an approved medical device for human use. In July, Musk announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had designated Neuralink a “Innovative device”, a status that should accelerate the federal review process. As much as you can, at least considering the icy pace of government for this sort of thing. It could still be years or even decades before we saw significant progress in the legal field.
In the meantime, maybe Neuralink can teach Pager to play a few more games with his mind. I think they miss a great opportunity if the next one isn’t something from the Donkey Kong series. Or even better: Ape Escape.