Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's neuroscience startup Neuralink unveiled Pager, a nine-year-old Macaque, playing MindPong with his Neuralink. The monkey that has had a coin-sized computer chip - the Link - in its brain is playing on a computer only using his mind.
The promising experiment showed off an early step toward the goal of curing human diseases with the same type of implant in order to enable people with paralysis to directly use their neural activity to operate computers and mobile devices with speed and ease.
Co-founded by Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2016, San Francisco Bay Area-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces (BMI) that include thousands of electrodes in the most complex human organ: the brain.
To develop and advance the functionality of the Link, it is necessary to employ an animal model whose brain similarity and behavioral abilities enable the development of a hand and arm-based motor cortical BMI.
According to the company's statement, the rhesus macaque model allowed Neurolink to design, validate, and advance the performance and robustness of a complete “closed-loop” motor BMI system intended to improve the quality of life of people with neurological disorders.
With monkeys, the company calibrate the decoder by mapping neural activity patterns to actual (joystick) movements. However, they won't be able to use such a strategy for people with paralysis.
The first goal of the company is to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back: to communicate more easily via text, to follow their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.
Then, the Link could also help improve the lives of those with neurological disorders and disabilities in other ways.
The Link could also be used to restore physical mobility for people with paralysis, enabling them to type emails and text messages, browse the web, or anything else that can be done with a computer, just by thinking about how they want the cursor to move.
Reuters contributed to this report.