Neuralink has successfully implanted a device in a second patient designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices just by thinking, according to startup owner Elon Musk.
Neuralink is testing a device to help people with spinal cord injuries, enabling its first patients to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media and move a cursor on a laptop.
Musk offered few details about the second patient, who suffered a spinal cord injury similar to that of the first, who was paralyzed in a diving accident, during the more than eight-hour podcast released late Friday. Musk said 400 of the electrodes in the second patient’s brain implant are functioning. Neuralink’s website says its implants have 1,024 electrodes.
“I don’t want to sound ominous, but the second implant appears to have worked extremely well,” Musk told podcast host Lex Friedman. “There’s a lot of signal, there’s a lot of electrodes. It’s working extremely well.”
Musk did not say when Neuralink performed the surgery on the second patient, but said the company plans to offer implants to eight more patients this year as part of clinical trials.
The first patient, Noland Arbaugh, was also interviewed on the podcast along with three Neuralink executives, providing more details about how the implant and the robot-guided surgery work.
Before he got the implant in January, Arbaugh used a stick in his mouth to tap on a tablet screen to use a computer. With the implant, Arbaugh says, he can now just think about what he wants to happen on the computer screen and make it happen. He says the device has given him a degree of independence and reduced his reliance on caregivers.
After surgery, Arbaugh ran into problems with the implant’s thin wires retracting, causing a rapid decline in the number of electrodes that can measure brain signals — an issue that Neuralink was aware of in animal studies, Reuters reports.
Neuralink said it had made changes, including modifying its algorithm to be more sensitive, that restored the implant’s ability to monitor Arbaugh’s brain signals, and that Arbaugh had broken the previous world record by controlling the cursor with thought alone, “with only about 10 to 15 percent of the electrodes activated,” Musk said on the podcast.
Musk also said he had spoken to US President-elect Donald Trump about setting up a commission to improve “government efficiency” by reducing corporate regulation, and said he would be open to participating. Musk said he believes US regulations stifle innovation.
