Neuralink’s First User Is ‘Constantly Multitasking’ With His Brain Implant
In 2016, Noland Arbaugh suffered a spinal cord injury while swimming in a lake. The details are fuzzy, but what he remembers is rushing toward the water with his friends, diving in, and hitting his head on something—or someone. He floated to the surface, unable to move.
Doctors later confirmed that he was paralyzed from the neck down. Arbaugh went from being a self-sufficient college student to moving back in with his parents and relying on them for his daily needs. He learned how to get around in a wheelchair and use a mouth-held stick to operate an iPad, but the hardest adjustment was feeling like he was a burden on his family.
The year 2016 was also when Elon Musk cofounded the brain implant startup Neuralink. This January, Arbaugh became the first person to receive the company’s investigational device, dubbed Telepathy, as part of a clinical trial. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it decodes intended movement signals in the brain and translates them into computer commands. Arbaugh just has to think about moving a cursor on his laptop screen and it moves.
