Elon Musk's patient with a chip in his brain started playing chess with his mind

“I don’t want people to consider this the end of the journey.”

Elon Musk’s Neuralink demonstrated its first patient with a chip implanted in the brain, how he plays chess with the power of his thoughts

Photo: Social networks

Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed from the shoulder down after a traffic accident, received the implant from Neuralink in January, Sky News recalls.

And now there's a new sensation: the first patient to receive a brain chip from Elon Musk's Neuralink appears to be playing online chess.

Neuralink posted a nine-minute video in which a patient paralyzed from the shoulders down appears to move a cursor across a laptop screen, thinking about nothing but himself thoughts. The video shows him playing chess and turning off the music on his laptop.

The patient, who had not previously been identified, said in a livestream video that his name is Noland Arbo, he is 29 years old and was paralyzed from the shoulder down after a traffic accident.

Arbo received the implant from company in January and was able to control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Elon Musk said last month.

Musk previously said the goal of the brain chip was to eventually enable users with disabilities such as the late Stephen Hawking , "communicate faster than an auctioneer.

He also claimed that it could potentially treat obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia, recalls Sky News.

«The operation was very simple,» Noland Arbaugh said in a video posted on the social media platform Mask X. referring to the implantation procedure. – Literally a day later I was discharged from the hospital. I do not have cognitive impairment.»

The young man says that he “almost stopped playing” Civilization VI, but «you all [Neuralink] gave me the opportunity to do it again, and I played for eight hours that day.» However, Noland Arbo admitted that the new technology «isn't perfect.»  and had to "face some challenges.".

"I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there is still a lot of work ahead, but it has already changed my life," he added .

In a Neuralink video, Noland Arbaugh talks about the process he underwent while training on the device after doctors implanted it in January. He said he would think about moving his hand, and that eventually moving the computer cursor had become second nature to him.

«It just became intuitive to me that I was starting to imagine the cursor moving. It was like using a force on a cursor and I could make it go where I wanted it to go,” he said, using a Star Wars reference. Every day it seems like we learn something new,” he said.