Monkey thinks, monkey plays: Musk's brain-chip start-up struts its stuff

NEW YORK • Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's brain-chip start-up has released footage appearing to show a monkey playing a simple video game after being implanted with new technology.

The three-minute video released on Friday shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing Mind Pong.

Although he was trained to move a joystick, it is now unplugged. He controls the paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.

"First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs," Mr Musk tweeted on Thursday. "Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neura-links in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again. The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel totally normal."

Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey's motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, said the video's voiceover.

"Using these data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modelling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce."

San Francisco-based Neuralink, co-founded by Mr Musk in 2016, aims to implant wireless brain computer chips to help cure neurological conditions, including Alzheimer's, dementia and spinal cord injuries, and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.

In August last year, Mr Musk unveiled a pig with a Neuralink chip implant, describing it as "a Fitbit in your skull".

Mr Musk has a history of bringing together diverse experts to develop technology previously limited to academic labs, including for rockets and electrical vehicles, through his companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.

REUTERS