Monkey MindPong

this is pager he's a nine-year-old macaque who had a neurolink placed in each side of his brain about six weeks ago if you look carefully you can see that the fur on his head hasn't quite fully grown back yet he's learnt to interact with a computer for a tasty banana smoothie delivered through a straw we can interact with the neurolinks simply by pairing them to an iphone just as you might pay your phone to a bluetooth speaker the links record from more than 2000 electrodes implanted in the regions of page's motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements neurons in this region modulate their activity with intended hand movement for example some might become more active when he moves his hand up and others when he moves it to the right by recording from many neurons and feeding their activity into a decoder algorithm we are able to predict page's intended hand movements in real time first we calibrate the decoder by recording neural activity as pager uses the joystick to move a cursor to targets presented on the screen as he's playing this game we're wirelessly streaming in real time the firing rates from thousands of neurons to a computer using these data we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce after only a few minutes of calibration we can use the output from the decoder to move the cursor instead of the joystick pager still moves the joystick out of habit but as you can see it's unplugged he's controlling the cursor entirely with decoded neural activity our goal is to enable a person with paralysis to use a computer or phone with their brain activity alone because they wouldn't be able to move a joystick they would calibrate the decoder by imagining hand movements to targets one of the things the neurolynx allow pager to do is to play his favorite video game pong to control his paddle on the right side of the screen pager simply thinks about moving his hand up or down we've removed the joystick altogether now that he's up to speed let's increase the difficulty and see how well pager can play with the neuralink as you can see pager is amazingly good at mindpong he's focused and he's playing entirely of his own volition it's not magic the reason neurolink works is because it's recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain great game pager and what better reward for a monkey than a banana we still have challenges spanning many fields of engineering so if you're good at solving hard problems and want to change people's lives even if you've never worked with the brain before we would love to hear from you

Channel: Neuralink

Views: 2,486,409

Rating: 4.9317207 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: rsCul1sp4hQ

Length: 3min 28sec (208 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Sonicblue123]

This might be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.

[u/3BoBaH3]

You can pair a monkey to your iPhone, just like how you would pair a Bluetooth speaker!

... YOU CAN PAIR A MONKEY TO YOUR PHONE! Of course there's an app for that!

[u/lusciouslou91]

I knew my League of Legends teammates were fucking monkeys without keyboards. Now I have proof.

[u/BloodSteyn]

I can now rest assured that one day when I'm old and decrepit with arthritis and chronic back pain I can still be there, pwning n00bs in whatever game I choose to play, while sucking on a Vicodin dispenser.

[u/Bobby_Money]

those sound cool for prosthetics

[u/i9090]

ODBII for the brain.

[u/Dr_D-R-E]

Forget the neurosurgery and iPhone hookup to the prefrontal cortex.

How the hell can he play pong and eat at the same time???

[u/Antigen_Shift]

Looks like Ghost in a Shell will soon be a reality.

[u/Rhawk187]

I don't think I mind giving a nueral link read access to my brain, but I'm pretty leery about giving someone write access.