Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip company looking for next human volunteer after first patient encounters problem
ELON Musk has said his brain chip lab Neuralink is looking for a second human participant.
The tech mogul took to social media to share the news just days after his company revealed the first ever patient experienced an issue after surgery.
“Neuralink is accepting applications for the second participant,” Musk posted to X on Friday.
“This is our Telepathy cybernetic brain implant that allows you to control your phone and computer just by thinking.”
Musk’s neurotechnology company in January installed a brain implant in Noland Arbaugh, its first human test subject, which the billionaire head of Tesla and X touted as a success.
Arbaugh was left paralyzed from the shoulders down by a diving accident eight years ago.
Shortly after the implant operation, he told of playing chess and the video game “Civilization” as well as taking Japanese and French lessons by controlling a computer screen cursor with his brain.
Neuralink’s technology works through a device about the size of five stacked coins that is placed inside the human brain through invasive surgery, of which the threads are a key signal collecting component.
A company blog post said threads connecting the implant to Arbaugh’s brain recently “retracted… resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes” and the patient’s ability to operate the cursor.
While offering no explanation for the receding threads, the company said it made modifications to make the implant more sensitive to neural signals.
This, with other improvements, “produced a rapid and sustained improvement in bits-per-second, that has now superseded Noland’s initial performance.”
The drop in the implant’s efficiency was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The startup, co-founded by Musk in 2016, aims to build direct communication channels between the brain and computers.
The ambition is to supercharge human capabilities, treat neurological disorders like ALS or Parkinson’s, and maybe one day achieve a symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.
Musk is not alone in trying to make advances in the field, which is officially known as brain-machine or brain-computer interface research.
‘LUXURY OVERLOAD’
Arbaugh was left quadriplegic after a “freak diving accident” eight years ago that dislocated two of his vertebrae.
He said the tech has enabled him to “do things on my own again without needing my family at all hours of the day and night”.
NEURALINK CONTROVERSY
Experiments allegedly left 15 out of 23 monkeys dead.
In one instance, a monkey was found missing some fingers and toes, possibly caused by self-mutilation, legal papers claimed.
Another case revealed a female macaque monkey had electrodes implanted into its brain, which caused it to be overcome with vomiting, retching, and gasping.
An autopsy later showed the monkey suffered from a brain hemorrhage.
Bloody skin infections, monkeys collapsing, and other horrific side effects were also recorded in the results, according to court papers.
“No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant. First, our early implants, to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose terminal monkeys (sic) (close to death already),” Musk previously said on X.
He’s even able to beat friends at video games, with the ability to play chess, Mario Kart and Slay the Spire.
“Y’all are giving me too much, it’s like a luxury overload, I haven’t been able to do these things in eight years and now I don’t know where to even start allocating my attention,” Arbaugh explained.
“The games I can play now are leaps and bounds better than previous ones.
“I’m beating my friends in games that as a quadriplegic I should not be beating them in.”
Elon Musk's Neuralink
FOUNDED in 2016, Neuralink is Elon Musk's most ambitious project that aims to erase the biological barrier between human brain and big tech.
Musk’s company initially hired a bunch of experts in areas such as neuroscience, biochemistry and robotics to develop a chip that could be implanted into the skull.
April 2017 – Neuralink announced that it was aiming to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement
April 2021 – Neuralink shocked the world with a video of a Macaque monkey playing Pong using its mind via a wireless connection with the chip
May 2023 – Elon Musk’s Neuralink received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its first-in-human clinical trial
January 2024 – The company announced it successfully implanted the brain chip called Telepathy into a human skull
February 2024 – Elon Musk claimed the first human trial has been successful – with patient zero able to control a mouse using their brain