Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink, which specializes in the development of implantable neurocomputer interfaces, posted a video on YouTube in which a monkey controls the cursor on the screen using a chip embedded in the brain.
In the video, you can see how a 9-year-old macaque named Pager first deftly controls the joystick, moving the cursor after the orange square, for which he receives a banana smoothie through a metal tube. At this time, the Neuralink chip, implanted in the monkey six weeks before this experiment, constantly recorded information about which neurons were activated during the game, learning to predict the movements of its hands. After learning the patterns that were used for the game, the joystick was disconnected from the computer, and the monkey continued to play the ping-pong simulator using only his mind.
As a rule, such videos are supplementary material to articles published in scientific journals. Such studies contain information that can be verified by other scientists. But in this case, the Neuralink specialists posted only a video that suggests that the monkey can play video games using a brain implant. After all, there are already known cases when a paralyzed person controlled a robotic arm with the power of thought through a chip implanted in the brain. Ping-pong is a classics of neurocomputer interfaces. In 2006, the first paralyzed person with a brain implant, Matthew Nagle, participated in a similar experiment, learning to play ping-pong in four days.
Back in July 2019, Elon Musk announced that a monkey can control a computer using its brain and the Neuralink chip. Since then, the company has demonstrated its technology in pigs and has only now shown the Pager. Musk has already tweeted that Neuralink will allow a paralyzed person to write messages on a smartphone faster than a healthy person can. Ultimately, the main task of neurocomputer interfaces will be to deliver signals from a chip in the brain to a chip in the body’s major neural clusters, allowing paralyzed people to walk.
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