Neuralink's first brain implant patient beats friend at video game

Neuralink's first human patient became so skilled at using the company's brain implant that he was able to beat other players at video games.

Elon Musk's company announced Wednesday the progress of Noland Arbaugh. Noland Arbaugh received a brain implant in January that allows him to remotely control his laptop's cursor.

In March, Neuralink revealed that Arbor was using an implant to play games such as chess, Civilization VI, and Mario Kart. In an update Wednesday, the company reported that Arbaugh's use of the implant will only improve over time.

“The games you can play now are much better than the games you had before. I'm beating my friends at games, but I, being a quadriplegic, shouldn't be beating my friends,” he told Neuralink .

Arbor playing Mario Kart (Credit: Neuralink)

He also uses implants constantly. In a recent week, he logged 69 hours of his time, of which 35 hours were devoted to sessions with his Neuralink, and the remaining 34 hours were mainly focused on personal use over the weekend. .

One interesting development is that Arbaugh's use of the implant has improved despite “many threads pulling back” from the chip. These threads are very important because they contain electrodes that detect nerve signals and allow the chip to translate the signals into cursor movements.

Due to the loss of the electrode, Neuralink initially detected a decline in the performance of Mr. Arbaugh's implant. This amounted to a drop in “bits per second”, his measure of precision in cursor control. However, the company was able to make some software improvements, which “resulted in rapid and sustained improvements in BPS that now exceed Norland's initial performance,” Neuralink said.

(Credit: Neuralink)

“He has since achieved 8.0 BPS and is currently trying to beat Neuralink engineers' scores (about 10 BPS) by a dozen using the mouse,” the company added.

Last weekend, Arbaugh also said: live stream Find out more about implant calibration and performance measurements on Twitter/X. This involves quickly clicking on small flashing icons in the grid. This is a repeated process to measure BPS. In addition to testing with Neuralink, we plan to hold more live streaming sessions using the implant to play various PC games.

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Neuralink also said: “Our current efforts are focused on bringing the performance of cursor control to the same level as normal subjects and expanding functionality to include text input. We plan to expand it globally to enable control of robotic arms, wheelchairs, and other technologies that could help increase independence for people with quadriplegia.”