Video shows monkey playing Pong with its brain-computer technology

A video has been posted by Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, which showed a nine-year-old macaque monkey playing Pong with a joystick by using only his mind through brain-computer technology.

Neuralink Corporation is focusing on developing brain-machine interfaces that has uploaded a video on YouTube on April 9, showing a monkey who was first taught to play video games with a joystick after brain-chip implant.

The nine-year-old monkey, Pager, had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks before the video was shot, The Verge quoted the video’s unnamed narrator.

He was seen navigating an on-screen cursor using only its mind after being first taught to play video games for a banana smoothie reward, delivered through a metal straw.

The Neuralink device recorded information about which neurons were firing — learning, essentially, to predict hand movements by recording which regions fired while the monkey was playing Pong.

The joystick Pager used to play was disconnected from the computer after learning the patterns. The monkey appears to go on playing the game using only his mind — playing a game of Pong with no joystick whatsoever.

This style of scientific release is unusual; ordinarily, videos like this are supplementary material to peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals. Those papers contain data that can be checked by other scientists.

It is now believable that a monkey might play video games using a brain implant — after all, a paralyzed man has already used a robotic arm and a non-Neuralink brain implant to drink beer.

Pong is a classic of brain-machine interfaces — in 2006, Matthew Nagle did a similar feat with four days’ worth of training.

In July 2019, Musk said that a monkey had already been able to control a computer with its brain and the Neuralink implant.

Elon Musk had tweeted that the first Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs.

First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021

He said that the later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor or sensory neuron clusters, ‘thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again.’

He added that the device is implanted flush with the skull and charges wirelessly, so you look and feel totally normal.

Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.

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