Elon Musk’s Neuralink Successfully Implants Second Patient With Chip
Neuralink has successfully implanted its second trail patient with a brain chip. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
- The second implant has been installed with 400 of the 1,024 electrode threads still intact.
- Elon Musk and Neuralink aim to install eight additional implants in patients’ brains by the end of 2024.
- The first Neuralink patient is able to use computers, play video games, play chess, browse the Internet, and more just by thinking.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink has successfully implanted a chip into a second patient’s brain, and the company says the procedure has gone “extremely well.”
Just six months after the first implant, Neuralink appears to be making major progress on the cutting edge of science. It plans to implant even more implants in 2024.
Neuralink Implant No.2
Speaking on the 8-hour-long Lex Fridman podcast , Elon Musk and the Neuralink team have revealed that the company has implanted its brain chip in its second paralysis patient.
According to Musk, the patient appears to have fully recovered and has seen no adverse effects yet. He notes that the patient can currently move a mouse on the screen just by thinking about it.
“I don’t want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant. There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well,”
Without disclosing when the operation took place, Musk gave a few details about the patient, describing that they had a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient, Noland Arbaugh.
The chip is inserted into the brain with 64 electrode-containing threads. These act as the link between the chip and the brain, which then connects to an app that allows users to control devices. Interestingly, Musk noted that 400 of the 1,024 electrodes in the second patient’s brain were working.
The Neuralink team says they will continue to advance the technology, adding faster chips, more electrodes, and potentially multiple implants. Musk highlighted that Neuralink aims to recruit another 8 participants for its implant by the end of 2024.
First Trial
Noland Arbaugh, who was also present in the interview, is the first Neuralink PRIME Study participant and a quadriplegic who also suffered a spinal injury during a diving accident.
In a May 2024 patient update, Neuralink noted that many electrodes wired into the patient’s brain retracted during healing. Initially, the bits-per-second (BPS) cursor speed, the standard measure for cursor control speed and accuracy, fell.
But, despite this setback, the Neuralink team was prompted to rework data compression algorithms and hit new records. Arbaugh explains:
“Y’all are giving me too much, it’s like a luxury overload, I haven’t been able to do these things in 8 years and now I don’t know where to even start allocating my attention.”
With Neuralink, Arbaugh reports a significant increase in his quality of life and can play and beat his friends at complex video games such as Mario Kart and Civilization VI. He also reports regularly playing chess and browsing the Internet.
“[The Link] has helped me reconnect with the world, my friends, and my family. It’s given me the ability to do things on my own again without needing my family at all hours of the day and night.”
In the Lex Fridman podcast, Musk explains that Arbaugh has achieved incredible feats despite only 10% or 15% of the electrodes working. This suggests that Neuralink has yet to realize its full potential. Given the near-telepathic powers that the digital interface provides, a Neuralink chip operating at 100% capacity has absurdly brilliant implications.
A Bright Future?
Speaking with Joe Rogan last month, Arbaugh explained just how powerful the first iteration of the technology is for him, especially when it comes to gaming. It’s so accurate that, on occasion, it’s “moving before” he thinks to move it.
It goes without saying that Neuralink is an incredibly powerful technology, and Arbaugh is living proof of that. Though detractors have criticized the efficacy of the chip and its retracting threads, it stands to reason that the technology is working.
Naturally, the Neuralink team has plans to improve every facet of the technology, including the surgical process. Looking at more immediate plans, Neuralink’s head of neurosurgery, Matthew MacDougall, explained during a live stream:
“In upcoming implants, we plan to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant … that will put it closer to the brain and eliminate some of the tension on the threads,”
Things are looking positive. Arbaugh explained to Rogan that he often thinks about how many paralyzed people won’t have to be paralyzed and how they’ll “be able to live their lives again.”
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