Are monkey business going on here?
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neuroscience startup, released a video showing a primate playing Pong using only the power of his mind.
The approximately three and a half minute video shows Pager, a 9-year-old macaque monkey who had implanted two wireless neural recording and data transmission devices in his brain about six weeks before the clip was filmed. Pager sips a banana smoothie through a metal straw while using a joystick to maneuver the on-screen Pong paddles – but it turns out that joystick isn’t plugged in. The lab claims in a blog post that Pager actually moves the paddles with his brain activity via Neuralink implants.
Watch it here:
So how was this set up? Pager is trained to play video games with a joystick and to receive a banana smoothie as a reward. And initially, Neuralink’s N1 Link wireless devices registered which neurons were activated while Pager operated the joystick. Neuralink created a mathematical model of the relationship between Pager’s pattern of neural activity and the different joystick movements that this brain activity produced. After the Links learned to predict the pager’s hand movements, the joystick was disconnected from the game. And while Pager keeps moving the joystick out of habit, the Link devices in his brain actually move the cursor across the screen.
Hence, a monkey plays video games with its mind – or as one commenter put it, “Next video: Donkey Kong plays Donkey Kong,” referring to Nintendo’s iconic oversized monkey game that throws tons.
From the archives: Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows off a brain computer interface
The lab hopes to continue developing its brain implants so that the devices can one day help paralyzed people operate computers and mobile devices using their brain activity. Musk, the CEO of Tesla TSLA,
shared that mission on Twitter TWTR,
tweeted on Thursday night that the Neuralink devices could one day help someone with paralysis use a smartphone faster than a non-disabled person using their thumbs.
This builds on previous “mind control” developments, such as a quadriplegic featured in Science magazine in 2015 that could drink a beer with a mind-controlled robotic arm. And in 2006, a paralyzed man named Matthew Nagle moved a cursor on a computer and also controlled a TV and a robot using just his thoughts through a tiny sensor implanted in his brain.
In February, Musk said human trials at Neuralink could begin as early as this year.