Elon Musk’s patient with a chip in his brain started playing chess with his mind

Elon Musk’s Neuralink demonstrated to its first patient with a chip implanted in his brain how he plays chess with the power of his thoughts.

Noland Arbo, a 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed from the shoulder down after a road accident, received the implant from Neuralink in January, Sky News recalls.

And now there’s a new sensation: the first patient to receive a brain chip from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink appears to be playing online chess.

Neuralink posted a nine-minute video in which the patient, paralyzed from the shoulders down, appears to move a cursor across a laptop screen, thinking of nothing but his own thoughts. The video shows him playing chess and turning off the music on his laptop.

The patient, who had not previously been identified, said in a livestream video that his name was Noland Arbaugh, that he was 29 years old, and that he was paralyzed from the shoulder down after a traffic accident.

Arbo received an implant from the company in January and was able to control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Elon Musk said last month.

Musk has previously said the goal of the brain chip is to eventually allow disabled users like the late Stephen Hawking to “communicate faster than an auctioneer.”

He also claimed that it could potentially treat obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia, recalls Sky News.

“The surgery was very simple,” Noland Arbaugh said in a video posted on the social media platform Mask X, referring to the implantation procedure. “Literally a day later I was discharged from the hospital. I have no cognitive impairment.”

A young man says he’s “pretty much stopped playing” Civilization VI, but “y’all [Neuralink] gave me the opportunity to do it again, and I played for eight hours that day.”

However, Noland Arbaugh admitted that the new technology “is not perfect” and there were some “challenges to face.”

“I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s already changed my life,” he added.

In a Neuralink video, Noland Arbaugh talks about the process he underwent while training on the device after doctors implanted it in January. He said he would consider moving his hand, and that eventually moving the computer cursor became second nature to him.

“It just became intuitive to me that I was starting to imagine the cursor moving. It was like using a force on a cursor and I could make it go where I wanted,” he said, using a Star Wars reference. “Every day it feels like we’re learning something new,” he said .