Planted by Elon Musk's Neuralink Brain Chip, A Monkey Isn't Just Playing a Video Game

Elon Musk is indeed known as an entrepreneur with futuristic ideas. As a future industry mogul, Elon Musk has developed several development and applied technology projects, bringing together diverse experts to develop technologies previously limited to academic laboratories, including for rockets and electric vehicles, through companies such as Tesla Inc and SpaceX.

One line that continues to be developed is a brain chip startup called Neuralink. Recently the company featured footage of a monkey playing a simple video game after getting implanted with a new technology.

Well, so as not to be misunderstood, this test is not to prove that an animal can play games, but further than that, namely how to transfer waves in a monkey’s brain so that it can control movement in video games.

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The 3-minute video uploaded by Neuralink shows a 9-month-old male monkey named Pager playing a game. Well, for info, in this test a chip is embedded in each side of the pager’s brain. In this experiment, it was seen how a monkey named Pager could coordinate movements just by thinking about moving his hands.

“He learned to interact with a computer to get a delicious banana smoothie served through a straw,” says the narrator in the video as Pager moves the cursor on the screen using a joystick, CNN reports.

The pager controls the joystick handle just by thinking about moving his hand up or down.

“The first @Neuralink product will allow a person with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone with a thumb,” Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday.

“Newer versions will be able to switch signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in the motor/sensory cluster of the body, thus allowing paralyzed people to walk again. The device is skull implanted & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel completely normal ,” said Elon Musk, quoted by Reuters, April 10, 2021.

Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in areas of the monkey’s motor cortex, which coordinate hand and arm movements, the video narrates.

“Using this data, we calibrated the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between neural activity patterns and the various joystick movements they produce,” says the video’s narrator.

San Francisco-based Neuralink was founded in 2016. The company aims to implant wireless brain computer chips to help cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries, as well as combine humans with artificial intelligence.