Apart from sending all kinds of things into space, Elon Musk also founded a company in 2016 that implants wires into the brain. Neuralink is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain-machine interfaces, and recently, they showed us just what they’ve been up to.
Neuralink just released a video of a monkey named Paige playing Pong with his mind, thanks to a chip on the brain. The chip captures the patterns of neurons firing, allowing the monkey to control the pong paddle with his brain alone.
He had a Neuralink placed on each side of his brain about six weeks ago. The Neuralinks record from more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in the regions of Paige’s motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements. To control his paddle, Paige simply thinks about moving his hand up or down.
Neuralink claims their final goal is to ‘enable a person with paralysis to use a computer or phone with their brain activity alone’ – they would move the decoder by imagining hand movements.
The monkey also gets a steady stream of banana smoothie while playing, as a reward mechanism.
Watch the video below.
Musk tweeted the video as well, and the entire thing got a whole lot responses.
‘Stop monkeying around’ just hits different now.