‘The Force’ from Star Wars: Neuralink's Brain Chip Implant

Photo Credit: Neuralink via NPR

In January, Arizona resident Noland Arbaugh became the first human to receive Neuralink’s brain-computer interface implant. A diving accident in 2016 left Arbaugh quadriplegic, meaning he is fully paralyzed from the neck down.  

Neuralink is a neurotechnology company owned and co-founded by billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk. The company’s aim is to provide those with paralysis the ability to use technology with only their minds. 

In an X livestream, Arbaugh said he had no post-surgery issues, and that he was released from the hospital only a day after the surgery occurred. However, he also mentioned that the technology is “not perfect" and they "have run into some issues.” 

Arbaugh demonstrated the abilities of the chip by playing chess on a laptop, moving the cursor with nothing but his brain. He also talked about Neuralink and his thoughts about his new abilities with the chip. "It's all brain-powered,” Arbaugh said. 

In the livestream, Arbaugh compared his experience surrounding the technology to using the force from Star Wars. "It's something I haven't been able to do much the last few years, especially not like this," he said.

Approximately a month after the implantation, Arbaugh lost a significant amount of the chip’s functionality. At first, Arbaugh believed the cause of it to be a software bug, but it was soon discovered to be a malfunction in the hardware. Neuralink’s analysis revealed that about 85 per cent of the electrode-studded implant threads had retracted — that is, they moved out of place. This malfunction was first publicly reported on May 8, months after the issue arose.

“That was really hard to come to terms with,” Arbaugh said to Scientific American. “I was just sinking my teeth into it. I’d reached this high place. And after a month, it [felt like it] was all going to come crashing down.”

Neuralink was eventually able to restore the majority of the implant’s functionality, and since then, Arbaugh has shown off his mental use of technology in online videos. However, some aspects have changed. For example, a new method for making a selection with a cursor had to be developed, but Arbaugh was eventually still able to glide the cursor across the screen smoothly. Arbaugh states that they plan to eventually return to the original method, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The company has not released a formal report on Arbaugh’s experience, which limits what is known to the general public. George Malliaras, an engineer at the University of Cambridge, says it isn’t clear why or exactly how much the threads displaced, and if they will continue to move out of place.  “We have to wait until papers are published with data,” he told Scientific American.

Meanwhile, the US Food and Drug Administration has allowed Neuralink to move forward with its trials and to implant another brain chip in a second person. Neuralink plans to implant the threads deeper than they were placed in Arbaugh’s brain as an attempt to combat the malfunction.

Arbaugh believes all the problems he’s gone through will eventually better this technology for other people using it in the future. “The whole point of this study was to find out what does and doesn’t work,” he told Scientific American. With the newfound information from the study, researchers at Neuralink are one step closer to accomplishing their ambitious goals: restoring movement to the paralyzed and sight to the blind.