Tesla CEO Elon Musk said a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its brain by Neuralink.
Neuralink put a chip into the monkey’s skull and utilized “minuscule wires” to associate it to its brain, Musk said.
Recently, a nine-year-old macaque monkey called Pager successfully played a game of Pong with its mind.
Pager was first shown how to play Pong in a conventional way, using a joystick. When he made a correct move, he’d receive a sip of banana smoothie. As he played, the Neuralink implant recorded the patterns of electrical activity in his brain. This identified which neurons control which movements.
The joystick could then be disconnected, after which Pager played the game using only his mind — doing so like a boss.
This Neuralink demo built on an earlier one from 2020, which involved Gertrude the Pig. Gertrude had the Link installed and output recorded, but no specific task was assessed.
“It’s not an unhappy monkey. You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight like dark mohawk.”
The billionaire said Neuralink is attempting to sort out if it can utilize its chips to get monkeys to play “mind Pong” with one another.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Neuralink’s group of around 100 individuals is attempting to foster an implementable neural chip. Musk depicts it as a Fitbit in your skull with little wires that go into your mind.
He said the purpose of Neuralink is to build the rate at which data can move from the human mind to a machine.
Neuralink could help people who are paralyzed with spinal or brain injuries, by giving them the ability to control computerized devices with their minds.
Prosthetic limbs might also be controlled by signals from the Link chip. And the technology would be able to send signals back, making a prosthetic limb feel real.
Neuralink has also claimed its technology could remedy depression, addiction, blindness, deafness, and a range of other neurological disorders.
