29-year-old quadriplegic, the first Neuralink user, plays chess online using BCI
Shahid Ahmed·1 min read
29-year-old Noland Arbaugh became the first user of Neuralink. He mentioned in the livestream that about eight years ago, he had a freak diving accident. It dislocated his C4 and C5 which made him quadriplegic. He is paralyzed and has no sensation of movement below the shoulders. "I love playing chess and so this is one of the things that you all have enabled me to do. Something that I wasn't able to do much, the last few years." - Noland says while we see the cursor moving on the screen controlled by his brain which is named, brain computer interface . Check out this fascinating piece of technology which could possibly help a lot of people getting various stuff done. Photo: Neuralink live stream
Bliss, an engineer at Neuralink, asks 29-year-old quadriplegic, Noland Arbaugh to explain how he is able to control the cursor using his brain. "We started trying out with a few different things. We basically went from what we call kind of differentiating like imagine movement versus attempted movement. So, lot of what we started out was with attempting to move. I would attempt to move say my right hand, left right forward back... from there I think it just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving, basically it was like using the force on a cursor and I could get it move wherever I wanted. Just stare somewhere on the screen and it would move where I wanted it to which was such a wild experience."
29-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, a Neuralink user, plays chess using Brain Computer Interface, next to Bliss, a Neuralink engineer | Photo: Neuralink live stream
