Neuralink, the startup of Elon Musk’s brain implant, has released a video showing a monkey using his device to play “Pong” with his mind.
Neuralink called the experiment “an initial demonstration of the potential capabilities” of its high-tech brain chips – although it is unclear whether the results will be evaluated by colleagues by scientists or published in an academic journal.
The 9-year-old macaque, named Pager, had two of Neuralink’s devices planted in his brain about six weeks before the company filmed the three-and-a-half-minute video.
Pager learned to interact with a computer while sucking a banana smoothie through a straw as a reward, according to the clip. While using a joystick to move a cursor to a target on the screen, a device recorded activity from the neurons responsible for the movements of its hands and transmitted them in a stream to a computerized algorithm that decoded them, says Neuralink .
After training the algorithm, Pager managed to give up the joystick and play “mind Pong” just thinking about the movement of his hand up or down, according to the video.
Musk – who teased Neuralink’s experiments with monkeys in February – marveled at his company’s achievements after the video was released on Thursday.
“A monkey literally plays a telepathic video game using a brain chip !!” billionaire technical tycoon he said on Twitter.
Neuralink hopes to eventually use their brain chips to allow paralyzed people to interact with computers or smartphones using only their brain activity. A Silicon Valley company called Synchron said in October that it had performed such tasks with a device implanted in its blood vessels.
Later versions of the Neuralink chip could connect devices planted in the brain with others in other parts of the body, “allowing, for example, paraplegics to walk again,” Musk said.
“The device is implanted in the skull and is charged wirelessly, so that you look and feel completely normal,” wrote on Twitter.
Pager isn’t the only creator Neuralink used to test its gadgets. The company previously installed a prototype in a pig named Gertrude to demonstrate its ability to transmit neural signals.