Noland Arbaugh has a computer chip embedded in his skull and an electrode array in his brain. But Arbaugh, the first user of the Neuralink brain-computer interface, or BCI, says he wouldn’t know the hardware was there if he didn’t remember going through with the surgery.
Capturing neural activity can be like trying to record chitchat between two people in a packed stadium, says Douglas Weber, a mechanical engineer and neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University. To hear anything more than the crowd’s roar, you need to get up close with the person speaking."The farther away from the speaker you are, the more mixed and muddled the conversations become,” he explains.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.What Neuralink has done, however, is condense multiple advances into a single implantable, intracortical, wireless device."They’ve kind of taken the best of everything that I’ve seen and put it all together," says Jennifer Collinger, a biomedical engineer and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Before the implant, if Arbaugh wanted to use a computer, he did so by voice command or moving a mouth stick across a touch screen . But with his BCI, Arbaugh says he’s able to do more—faster, independently and more comfortably.
"That was really hard to come to terms with," Arbaugh says. “I was just sinking my teeth into it. I’d reached this high place. And after a month, it was all going to come crashing down.”