Elon Musk's Neuralink Shows Brain-chip Patient Play Chess Online: Telepathy

In a livestream hosted on X Wednesday, by an engineer at Elon Musk's neurotechnology company Neuralink, 29-year-old patient Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, moved the cursor and played chess on his laptop using the company's brain-computer interface(BCI) device implanted in his brain.

The human brain is home to around 86 billion neurons, nerve cells connected to one another by synapses. Every time we want to move, feel or think, a tiny electrical impulse is generated and sent incredibly quickly from one neuron to another.

Scientists have developed BCI devices which can detect some of those signals -- either using a non-invasive cap placed on the head or wires implanted into the brain itself.

Neuralink's device, which is about the size of a one pound coin, is inserted into the skull, with microscopic wires which can read neuron activity and beam back a wireless signal to a receiving unit

Musk had said last month, that Arbaugh received a Neuralink implant in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the livestream, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments."

The 29-year-old said he's been able to play the video game Civilization VI. "You all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight," he said.

Arbaugh however noted that the device is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues."

"I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

Musk revealed his company's next product after the telepathic device.

"Blindsight is the next @Neuralink product after Telepathy," he wrote on X.

"I should mention that the Blindsight implant is already working in monkeys," he added in a follow-up post. "Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision. (Also, no monkey has died or been seriously injured by a Neuralink device!)"

WATCH Neuralink presentation of Noland Arbaugh.