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.”
It’s the first attempt. Failure is gonna happen. This isn’t big news. If they were rolling it out to market that would be different.
Sure failure is gonna happen but neuralink hasn’t been particularly successful with all the primates that have been tested with for previous version either.
Yeah it’s a really difficult problem. The criticism might be that it’s animal cruelty.
damn, imagine we did any other medical research with that attitude!
Yeah that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in medicine for ever. Are you supposed to just stop trying?
so, hate to break it to you, but we in fact don’t take that attitude with medical research, anything that had a tendency to kill the pre human control groups generally doesn’t keep going, Musk can do this because he is a high profile case, ironically it’s how he slips regulations all the time, because there would be backlash from the musk sycophants, but also the general wealthy community who use people like musk as a barometer on how much corruption they can get away with
Maybe not now but a lot of what we know in medicine caused animals and people to die despite knowing the risks of experimentation
no, not really, that’s just a commonly believed myth
Wow. Tell that to all the dead people. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Anesthesia. Vaccines. More recently Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
ya, nothing was learned in the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”(see racist torture), Vaccines also didn’t one about because we just started injecting people with random shit, and we knew of Anesthesia for a long time, it just wasn’t seen as something you use in medicine in more recent history because of religious superstitions in medicine.
again, Myths, just like the idea that we learned anything from Mengele’s horrors
What attitude you think people take with other medical research
not the silicone valley “keep breaking stuff until it works”