100 Days Later, Neuralink’s First Human Patient Is Now Using His Brain Implant to Play Slay the Spire

ign.com:

The first human Neuralink implant recipient is playing Slay the Spire, Old School RuneScape, and a range of other popular games by using the implant to translate his neural signals.

Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company also revealed in a new update that a number of the implant’s electrode-bearing threads had retracted from the patient’s brain, leading to a temporary drop off in the performance of the brain-computer interface (BCI).

Back in January, Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk took to X to announce the company had implanted its first ‘N1’ brain chip in the head of a human patient as part of its Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) study. The patient was later revealed to be 29-year-old American quadrapalegic Noland Arbaugh, who had suffered paralysis below the shoulders after sustaining a spinal injury during a diving accident some eight years ago.

During the surgery, a circular section of skull was removed to grant a specialized robot access to a section of Arbaugh's brain. The robot used a needle thinner than a human hair to insert a collection of 64 ultra-fine electrode-bearing threads into the grey matter. These newly installed sensors are designed to detect the patient's neural signals, and send the resulting data up the threads to the main body of the N1 implant, which had been installed in the skull gap created during the surgical procedure. Signals from the implant are then transmitted to a Neuralink Application, which is being trained to decode the intent behind the information and convert it into executable actions, such as the movement of a computer cursor.

Prior to the surgery, Arbaugh had to rely on a mouth stick - an assistive tool that lets the user apply pressure to a touchscreen once placed in the mouth - to play games and interact with the digital world. While this did allow Arbaugh to use an iPad, it came with a range of drawbacks. For example, in order to use the mouth stick he had to be sat upright and have a caregiver