On March 20, Elon Musk's Neuralink introduced 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh as the first patient to have received its brain-computer implant.
The neurotechnology company posted a video on Mr. Musk's X platform, showing Mr. Arbaugh playing chess on a computer, directing a cursor to play the game by thinking. Mr. Arbaugh was in a diving accident in 2016 that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down.
In late January, Mr. Musk announced the first human had received the brain chip implant and was recovering well. At the time, no details about the patient or their condition were released. Mr. Arbaugh said he left the hospital one day after surgery and has since been learning how to use the implant, which is about the size of a quarter and is placed in a person's skull by a surgical robot.
"It just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving," he said in the video, describing it as "using the force on a cursor" to get it to respond appropriately. "It's so cool. … Every day I'm learning new stuff."
He added that it hasn't been "perfect" and that "we have run into some issues," adding that it will be a journey to continue learning how to adapt to the device.
Mr. Musk has previously said initial users of Neuralink's first product, called Telepathy, will be people who have lost use of their limbs. The brain-computer interface "enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking," Mr. Musk has said. Eventually, the company intends for the brain implants to augment healthy people for humans to keep up with artificial intelligence.
Neuralink was founded in 2017 and received FDA clearance for clinical trials in humans last May. The company has been criticized for its surgical work in animals leading up to its clearance for human trials over the past few years. In December 2022, current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters that the company's push for speed led to unnecessary animal deaths.
There are several other rival companies working on brain-computer interfaces, including Paradromics and Precision Neuroscience, which have not yet implanted their devices permanently into a human, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, a company called Synchron has done so, though their stent is implanted outside of the brain and therefore may not be able to capture as much data.