Elon Musk’s Neuralink allowed a monkey to ‘play video games with his mind’

• Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has already implanted a chip in a monkey’s brain that allows it to “play video games with its mind.”
• Musk made the same claim in an extensive interview on Clubhouse on Sunday night
• Neuralink focuses on human-computer interfaces for artificial intelligence in humans.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s human-computer interface company, has made a strong start.

“We already have a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull, and the little wires that can play video games with its mind,” Musk said in a new interview.

“One of the things we’re trying to figure out is whether we can get the monkeys to play ‘Pong’ with each other,” he told the hosts of the Good Time Show, a talk show held in the clubhouse. “That would be cool.”

Neuralink has been testing neural interfaces on animals for years now. In a video released last year, Neuralink demonstrated his work on a pig named Gertrude.

In that video, Neuralink demonstrated its ability to record and possibly predict actions based on a wired chip implanted in Gertrude’s brain.

But according to Musk, the monkey playing video games was implanted with a wireless chip that allowed him to control an electronic interface only with his mind.

“He doesn’t feel uncomfortable and he doesn’t look weird,” Musk said, “and you can’t even see where the neural implant went in.”

The cordless bit is particularly important as it can eliminate the chance of infection that comes with threads sticking out of organic matter.

“If you can do experiments with something that doesn’t have wires going through the skin, it will improve animal welfare,” Newcastle University neuroscientist professor Andrew Jackson told Insider last year.

Listen to the full interview here: