Monkey plays video games with his mind

NEURALINK, a research company owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, recently released a video of a nine-year-old macaque monkey playing a video game using just his mind.

Scientists had taught the monkey, named Pager, to play a simple ping-pong video game – first he played using a joystick and was rewarded with a banana smoothie each time he got it right.

Two tiny special devices were planted in Pager’s brain by a surgeon. This was to help them record and understand how the animal controls and sends signals to his arms and hands to play the game.

A monkey’s brain works in a similar way to a human’s. The brain is like a central computer that controls everything we do – what we think and feel, how we learn and remember and the way we move and talk.

The brain uses our nervous system – a network that sends messages back and forth from the brain to different parts of the body. It tells us when to do things like pedalling a bike or grabbing hold of a cellphone. The messages are sent via the spinal cord in our bodies.

Neuralink’s scientists recorded all these messages. They then used computers to understand Pager’s brain by linking it to the movements his hands were actually making.

Elon, who also owns car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, believes this research will support Neuralink’s efforts to develop technology to help humans control things by using only our brains in the future.

More especially, he hopes it will be helpful to paralysed people who are unable to move their limbs. The technology should allow them to control a smartphone just by thinking.