BRAIN POWER

Early this year, controversial techbillionaire Elon Musk stunned the world once again with his announcement – on the private social media app Clubhouse – that his startup Neuralink had plugged a monkey’s brain with a wireless implant enabling the monkey to play video games with its mind.

In the Clubhouse chatroom, Musk told listeners: “You can’t see where the implant is and he’s a happy monkey. We have the nicest monkey facilities in the world. We want them to play mindpong with each other.”

The announcement was followed up in April with a three-minute video showing a nine-year-old male macaque named Pager, with chips in either side of its brain, playing a game of Pong, the famous 1970s video game that mimics a game of table tennis. Initially trained to play the game with a joystick, and rewarded with a banana smoothie sip for each correct move (fed through the metal straw above) he appears to be playing the game by simply thinking. According to the video, Neuralink records and decodes electrical signals (below) using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey’s motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements.

The experiment is one of Neuralink’s first steps towards developing wireless brain computer chips that can help circumvent neurological conditions like

Alzheimer’s, dementia, and spinal cord injuries.

Potential applications include enabling someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind, according to a tweet from Musk.