ELON MUSK’S NEURALINK SHOWS MONKEY PLAYING VIDEO GAME WITH MIND

Sat 10 April 2021:

The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup released footage on Friday appearing to show a monkey playing a simple video game after getting implants of the new technology.

“Pager” the monkey had two Neuralink chips installed on either side of his brain some six weeks ago.

“First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021

He then successfully learned how to use a joystick to move the cursor around the screen to reach his targets to play the video game Pong.

After that, the scientists removed the joystick and Pager was playing the game using his brain activity by simply imagining moving the joystick.

“The reason Neuralink works is because it’s recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain,” the company said in the video.

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, the video’s voiceover said.

“Using these data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce.“

Co-founded by Musk in 2016, the San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence – though the technology is still in its early stages.

In August 2020, Musk unveiled a pig with a Neuralink chip implant, describing it as “a Fitbit in your skull”. In July 2019, Neuralink showed off a design that involved implanting tiny electrode “threads” into the brain as well as another device behind the ear.

Co-founded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2016, San Francisco Bay Area-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces that include thousands of electrodes in the most complex human organ to help cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries, and ultimately fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.