With the chip implanted in the brain by the startup of Elon Musk, this monkey can play games purely with its mind

A 3-minute video posted by Neuralink shows Pager, a male monkey with chips on each side of its brain, playing ‘Mind Pong’, or playing Pong with its thoughts.

In the video, Pager learned how to interact with the game, by using the joystick to control the cursor on the screen. Each time the joystick lever moves up and down successfully, Pager will receive a “reward” with a banana smoothie pumped through a straw.

After seeing the animal was familiar with the controls, the researchers disconnected the joystick and let Pager move the pointer with his brain. This shows that the Neuralink wireless chip implanted in Pager’s brain is functioning properly, allowing this 9-year-old monkey to play games with his own thoughts.

It is known that the Neuralink chip works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the motor cortex of the monkey. This cortical region is where the hand and arm movements are coordinated.

“By analyzing these data, we calibrated the decoder by modeling the relationship between the parts of neural activity and hand motion that monkeys produce,” says Neuralink.

“Neuralink’s first product can help a paralyzed person use a smartphone through the brain faster than a person using a finger,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his personal Twitter on July 7. / 4.

Neuralink is a startup founded by Elon Musk in 2016 and officially launched in 2017. As a neural technology company, Neuralink aims to develop products that help people “symbiotic with mind. artificial intelligence “.

The specific product they’re developing is a chip that is implanted directly into the brain. Described by Musk as “a Fitbit device in your skull with tiny wires”, this microscopic chip can do a lot of things: from streaming music directly from the internet to your brain. , enhancing hearing for the wearer, treating depression to neurological diseases such as Parkinson …

Neuralink chip

In August 2020, billionaire Musk unveiled a project to implant a Neuralink chip into a pig. In a video released last year, Neuralink showed the results of transmitting nerve signals from the brain of a pig named Gertrude.

In this experiment, Neuralink was able to record nerve signals as Gertrude ran around, and try to predict next action, based on a wired chip implanted in the brain.

Refer to Reuter