Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows monkey with brain-chip ‘play video game with its mind’

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip company has released a video of a monkey appearing to play a video game with its mind rather than a joystick.

The three-minute video by Neuralink on Thursday (April 9) shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of his brain, playing “Mind Pong”.

Although he was trained to move a joystick, it is now unplugged and he unknowingly controls the virtual paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.

“First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs,” Musk tweeted.

“Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again.

“The device is implanted flush with skull and charges wirelessly, so you look and feel totally 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 video’s voiceover said.

“Using these data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce.”

Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humans with artificial intelligence.

In August 2020, Musk unveiled a pig with a Neuralink chip implant, describing it as “a Fitbit in your skull”.

Musk has a history of bringing together experts to develop technology previously limited to academic labs through his companies Tesla Inc and SpaceX.