Sitting down with Neuralink’s 1st brain chip implant patient

in January Elon Musk announced that for the first time his company neurolink implanted a brain chip in a human as part of a preliminary clinical trial this is fascinating neuralink aims to help people living with debilitating conditions communicate and control external devices with their thoughts and our will re sit down sit down rather with the patient who received that implant in an exclusive broadcast interview he is with us now in Atlanta Georgia will get to see you and and this story here it's a big one it certainly is DeMarco it's uh the future is arriving faster and faster these days and it was my honor to get to sit with Nolan arbaugh who was a fantastic subject a great guy he's been through a lot paralyzed for nearly eight years now but he says this neuralink device has really changed his life I didn't have anything to wake up for in the morning um and this has changed that for me in a GMA broadcast exclusive Nolan arbaugh the first human implanted with a neuralink chip in his brain is telling his story I accepted that I was paralyzed and that that was my life I always held out hope that it would all get better at 22 years old Nolan says he Dove head first in waste deep water struck something and sustained a spinal cord injury he couldn't move from the shoulders down from the time of your injury until earlier this year what was your daily life like I mean one thing about being paralyzed is that there's a lot of time to sit and think think so I thought through basically my whole life and realized all the mistakes I'd made and what I could do better then just last year Noland now 30 receiving a life-changing opportunity one day one of my buddies from college uh called me up um we talk pretty regularly and he was like hey neuralink they opened up the human trials um and I said what's neuralink neuralink co-founded by Elon Musk is an experimental implantable brain computer interface or BCI a chip surgically implanted by a robot and connected by threads to a patient's brain that allows the patient to control a computer or smartphone with their mind this is all from there to there yeah man wow neuralink is not the only company working on this technology several others are also testing their bcis in paralyzed volunteers Noland now joins that small group as neural Link's first patient I was just very happy that I would be a part of something that I believe is so Monumental in this next step forward of helping people with paralysis what can you do now with the chip implanted that you could not do prior um I can control a computer just like anyone else can which is not something I was able to do beforehand you just played some music yeah man that's awesome do you worry because you are the first patient that something unforeseen could go wrong now that this this is inside your head I wouldn't say worry it was something where I knew that if I did this then it would take a lot of headache and heartache away from the people down the road just last week news that some of the threads in Nolan's brain had retracted affecting the performance of the device how did you take the news when they told you that the threads had retracted yeah it was really hard it was very very hard to give up all of the amazing things that I was able to do I think I like cried basically afterwards the problem becoming an opportunity for the makers of neuralink to explore Solutions the reason we do clinical trial um and you know early feasibility trial is to uncover these sort of issues as early as possible before they get marketed and we rolled up our sleeves and you know found various different ways to you know for Nolan be able to recover his performance which we have successfully been able to do as for Nolan the future of the technology only looks bright it's going to be amazing when someone can have a spinal cord injury go into a hospital get surgery and walk out a couple days later I think it's going to happen I don't think it's as far away as people might think wow horrible story and well you mentioned that this isn't the first of this kind of Technology why do you think we're hearing so much about this particular one well there is the Elon Musk of it all Eva the billionaire founder of course draws attention to everywhere he goes neurolinks main thing is the the tiny little threads that are thinner than a human hair that are implanted in a participant or a patient's brain that is what they're advancing uh the most in their technology there are a lot of companies doing it Elon Musk does help bring the attention I can't get enough of this story so when could this implant be made more widely available well DeMarco you know anything with medical device medical breakthroughs generally the time Horizon is measured in years but DJ Su the co-founder of neuralink did tell me that his company is planning to implant participants number two and three in these trials in just the coming months so they are looking to ramp up uh these trials as are other companies of similar nature some fascinating stuff well you mentioned that there was a problem with the connective threads so what has neuralink done to fix that problem for the future well Dr Darion what there the problem was those threads retracting which basically in layman's terms means that the device wasn't working as well but what neuralink did was go in tweaked the algorithm and they claim now his BPS bits per second that is the the standard measurement for how this stuff works they've actually improved it they say versus when Nolan was initially implanted so this is all Uncharted Territory for the most part so they're figuring it out as they go but look how far we've come wow right will thank you very much we appreciate it and good to see you

Channel: Good Morning America

Views: 543,492

Keywords: brain, chimp, exclusive, gma3, health, implant, neuralink, neuroscience, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-110342028, patient, reeve, will

Id: tDTr252Xskg

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024