(Reuters) – Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain chip startup released images on Friday that appear to show a monkey playing a simple video game after receiving implants of the new technology.
Neuralink’s 3-minute video features Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of his brain, playing “Mind Pong.” Although he was trained to move a joystick, he is now disconnected. He controls the palette simply by thinking of the movement of his hand up or down.
“The first @Neuralink product will allow a person with paralysis to use a smartphone with a mind faster than someone who uses their thumbs,” Musk wrote on Twitter Here on Thursday.
“Subsequent versions will be able to disrupt signals from Neuralink in the brain to Neuralink in the motor body / sensory neuron bodies, thus allowing, for example, paraplegics to walk again. The device is implanted in color with the skull and is charged wirelessly, so that you look and feel completely normal. ”
Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals in the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey’s motor cortex, which coordinate hand and arm movements, the video said.
“Using this data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between neural activity patterns and the different joystick movements they produce.”
Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant computer chips for wireless brains to help cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries, and human joints. with artificial intelligence.
In August 2020, Musk unveiled a pig with a Neuralink implant, describing it as “a Fitbit in the skull.”
Musk has a history of bringing together different experts to develop technology previously limited to academic labs, including missiles and electric vehicles, through companies such as Tesla Inc. and SpaceX.
Reuters Television reporting; Written by Richard Chang, edited by Rosalba O’Brien