Neuralink shows a monkey playing a game by thinking
Neuralink, a startup owned by billionaire Elon Musk and focused on developing a brain-computer interface, has posted a 3-minute video on YouTube that shows a monkey playing a simple video game on screen using only his brain.
The video clip shows a monkey with slices embedded in each side of its brain playing Mind Pong, as the monkey underwent a transplant six weeks before the video was shot.
Although the monkey has been trained to move the joystick, it is not connected. The monkey controls the paddle by thinking of moving its hand up or down.
Musk wrote through his official account on the Twitter platform: Neuralink's first product allows a paralyzed person to use a smartphone with his mind faster than anyone who uses his fingers.
Later versions should be able to convert signals from Neuralink slices in the brain to Neuralink slices in the body's motor and sensory neuron groups, thus enabling paraplegics to walk again.
- And Musk added: The device is implanted within the skull cap and is charged wirelessly so that the user feels and looks natural.
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.
"We use this data to calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick motions it produces," the company said.
Neuralink, which Musk founded in 2016, aims to implant brain wireless computer chips to help treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and spinal cord injuries, and to integrate the human race with artificial intelligence.
Musk has a history of bringing together diverse experts to develop technology previously restricted to academic laboratories, including missiles and electric vehicles, through companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.