Neuralink’s first human patient controlled mouse with thoughts, says Elon Musk

“Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with neural effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking,” Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X, according to Reuters.

The Neuralink device currently consists of a chip and an electrode array with more than 1,000 flexible conductors that surgical robot threads into peoples’ cerebral cortexes, according to Scientific American. These electrodes are designed to register thoughts related to motion. Musk hopes that an app will eventually be able to translate these signals to control computers by thinking.

“Enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal,” wrote Musk in a post on the platform X in January this year.

The company’s original ambitions seemed to probe in the direction of intermeshing the human brain with artificial intelligence. But now, it seems to be working towards the more realistic (in the short term) goal of developing brain-computer interfaces.

Musk’s announcement on Monday is not exactly a surprise. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Nerualink’s chip for human clinical trials in May 2023 and in September the same year, the company announced that it was opening enrollment to a study for people with quadriplegia.

In the meanwhile, the company has been raking up scandals, seemingly wholesale. Wired in September 2023 reported on how monkeys used in trials by Neuralink had to go through gruesome suffering before they had to be euthanised. Some of the complications the monkeys suffered included bloody diarrhoea, partial paralysis and cerebral edema (brain swelling).