Neuralink | First human patient controls computer mouse with thought, says Elon Musk

(San Francisco) Elon Musk announced that the first patient to receive a brain implant from Neuralink, a start-up he co-founded, was now able to control a computer mouse by thought.

“Progress is good, the patient appears to have made a full recovery, with no side effects that we are aware of. And he is able to control the mouse, to move it on the screen just by thought,” the multibillionaire said Monday evening during a conversation in an audio lounge (Spaces) of X.

The boss of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X announced at the end of January that Neuralink had placed its first brain implant on a patient, as part of its first clinical trials.

Several other laboratories and companies have already succeeded in similar operations, allowing patients to carry out computer tasks through thought, and even to regain control of some of their limbs.

“We’re trying to get as many thought button presses as possible,” Musk continued. “So we’re currently working on the ability to click the mouse left and right, move it down and up, which is necessary if you want to click on something and drag it to another place.” .

Located in Fremont (California), in the San Francisco Bay, Neuralink obtained the green light in May from the American Drug and Medical Devices Regulatory Agency, the FDA.

Its implant, the size of a coin, has already been placed in the brain of a macaque, which managed to play the video game “Pong” without a controller or keyboard.

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is far from the only organization developing a brain-machine interface (BMI).

Researchers from the Grenoble Clinatec institute, for example, presented in 2019 an implant allowing a quadriplegic person to animate an exoskeleton and move their arms or move around.

Neuralink recently raised some $323 million from investors in two tranches, in August and November.

The start-up says it also wants to make paralyzed patients walk again, but also restore sight to the blind and even cure psychiatric illnesses such as depression.

Elon Musk also aims to offer his implant to everyone, in order to enable better communication with computers and to contain, according to him, the “risk for our civilization” that artificial intelligence represents.