The first Neuralink implant in a human malfunctioned after several threads recording neural activity retracted from the brain, the Elon Musk-owned startup revealed Wednesday.
The threads retracted in the weeks following the surgery in late January that placed the Neuralink hardware in 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh’s brain, the company said in a blog post.
This reduced the number of effective electrodes and the ability of Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, to control a computer cursor with his brain.
“In response to this change, we modified the recording algorithm to be more sensitive to neural population signals, improved the techniques to translate these signals into cursor movements, and enhanced the user interface,” Neuralink said in the blog post.
The company said the adjustments resulted in a “rapid and sustained improvement” in bits-per-second, a measure of speed and accuracy of cursor control, surpassing Arbaugh’s initial performance.
While the problem doesn’t appear to pose a risk to Arbaugh’s safety, Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company has also told the Food and Drug Administration that it believes it has a solution for the issue that occurred with Arbaugh’s implant, the Journal reported.
The implant was placed just more than 100 days ago. In the blog post, the company touted Arbaugh’s ability to play online computer games, browse the internet, livestream and use other applications “all by controlling a cursor with his mind.”
When did they work? Prior to getting approved in humans they were killing animals at a high rate. To the point where animals were smashing their heads against shit to get the chip out.
I understand testing on animals is tough but this was straight cruelty.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
I’m not defending this, but at least a human electively chooses this procedure and understands why they have a device attached to their head. The monkeys must have had no idea what was going on and just wanted to remove the foreign object.
Very valid point.
I could argue that the person was mislead, thinking it was successful in animal trials when it wasn’t. Plus the mental manipulation on a person that is a paraplegic, having hope this will improve their life is sad. Musk falsely claimed it was safe and no monkeys died due to the implant.
When I was in college working in a lab, we were worried about accidentally killing frogs with our equipment because we didn’t have anything filed with the IRB about frogs.
Everything with Elon bewilders me. I thought this is why we had regulatory agencies.
As we see most regulation agencies are underfunded and undermanned on purpose. I’m sure they are the same.
This is also why regulatory agencies have been systematically crippled over the last 40 years or so. Damn near every sector has had their regulatory agencies crippled by some combination of reducing authority, underfunding, and understaffing. When the agencies work, the message is “see, we don’t need those regulations anymore because we’re taking care of things fine on our own,” and when they stop working, the message is “we shouldn’t be spending money on these agencies! They don’t do anything anyway!”
they’re mice, they’re supposed to be used for testing. Yeah its unfortunate but its not like they are trying to hurt them.
Can you read?
It was working for a while for the guy. He was paralyzed from the neck down and he was able to use it to play some lame game like LoL or something.
Yeah I seen a money kinda play pong on it. It was cool and all but not ripping at your skull cool.
It sucks bc there are real companies developing the tech for an amazing cause. Elon is a dip shit that has no clue on how to run a company and he is actually hurting the research.
You don’t even need to be inserting probes to be able to do that…
OCZ had this ‘toy’ out in 2008.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16826100006
one of the reviews…
I still have this, but suspect it’s bricked after I’ve pressed the “do not press” button on the side. (i’m a filthy button pusher) If anybody has some firmware dumps or at least documentation, I’d appreciate it.
Never managed to use the brainwaves, but it was sensitive to the facial muscle movement. Good enough to play pong.
This thing seems to be a later iteration of the Atari Mindlink idea from the 1980s, which presented the illusion of controlling the game with just your thoughts/brain waves/whatever but which was actually just reading the neuromuscular voltage from your forehead (meaning you scrunch your forehead muscles around to control it).
ok but the real interesting stuff like reading hand writing from a paralyzed person imagining writing it and etc are all only for actual electrodes in brains.
IIRC dude went home and played Civ all night
Ah but you see, that was when they were testing the Worker Attitude Modulation software. (Researchers called it WAM for short and vehemently denied any connection to the word Wham.)