It was just over a year ago, specifically in January 2024, when Elon Musk’s company, Nueralink, dedicated to neuroscience managed to successfully implement a microchip in the brain of Noland Arbaugh, making it the first patient of the company.
After more than eight years paralyzed because of a traffic accident in 2016, Arbaugh has shared his experience in an interview with the BBC in which he explains how Neuralink’s microchip has changed his life and He has returned aspects of this that he thought he had lost forever.
While Neuralink is not the first company to achieve it, there is no doubt that the fact that Elon Musk’s name is behind makes it a more striking case, but the patient explains that He did not even for Musk in for himself, but for science and its development. “If everything went well, I could help being a neuralink participant,” he said, “If something terrible happened, I knew they would learn from it.”
After the accident that left him paralyzed, Arbaugh believed that he could never study, work or play video games again. “You just have no control, or privacy, and it’s hard,” the patient explained, “You have to learn that you have to depend on other people for everything.”
However, thanks to the Neuralink chip this man He has recovered part of the control of his life by being able to control a computer with said microchip. And when he woke up from the surgical intervention that the device installed him, he said that at first he was able to control a cursor on a screen thinking of moving his fingers.
“Honestly, at first I didn’t even know what to expect.” Over time, its ability to use the implant has increased to the point that you can play chess and video games. “I grew up playing,” he says, and adds that It was something that “had to put aside” when it was disabled. “Now I win my friends to games, which really shouldn’t be possible, but it is.”
The truth is that experts, despite the great advantages of this technology, see a negative side to all this, and as Anil Seth, a professor of neuroscience, University of Sussex, points out, points out, Sussex University, “The main problem is privacyonce you allow our brain activity to access, we are allowing access not only to what we do, but Potentially what we think, what we believe and what we feel. “
But this is not something that concerns Arbaugh and in fact, he wants technology to go more and explains that he would love that, for examplethe chip would be developed so that the wheelchair could control. This technology shows that development is very important, and that we can reach places that were previously impossible, still there is a long way forward, but these first steps of the sector are very promising.
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