Life With a Brain Chip: Neuralink's First Patient Shares How the Implant Helped Him 'Reconnect With the World'

Norland Arbaugh, Neuralink's first patient, has shared what life with a brain chip is like.

He expressed that the chip enabled him to reconnect with the world.

Neuralink's First Patient

While Arbaugh had the chip embedded into his skull and an electrode array attached to his brain, he said that he would not be aware of the hardware if he did not remember undergoing the surgery.

The 30-year-old resident from Arizona shared that if he were to lose his memory, wake up, and be told that he had a brain implant, he probably would not believe the remark. He added that he does not have any sensation of it.

Arbaugh has been left paralyzed below his neck's middle after a swimming accident that took place in 2016.

Though the chip could be unobtrusive in a physical sense, Arbaugh said that it has tremendously affected his life, enabling him to reconnect with the world once more.

He went through the novel surgery last January in order to get the N1 Implant, dubbed "the Link." This was the first approved human trial of Neuralink.

ALSO READ : First Neuralink Brain Implant Patient Can Play Games, Use Apps Despite Data Capture Reduction

Brain-Computer Interfaces

Though the existence of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can be traced back decades, Neuralink, owned by famous billionaire Elon Musk, has been a recipient of grave attention.

Neuralink has garnered public interest as it boasts of a technology that could help improve the lives of individuals with quadriplegia and other neurodegenerative diseases or disabilities.

This technology documents brain electrical activity and translates this into output actions, such as clicking the mouse on a computer. These interfaces may vary when it comes to invasiveness, extent, design, and information resolution.

Some BCIs are capable of detecting the electrical activity of neurons with totally external EEG (electroencephalogram) arrays placed on top of the head of a subject. There are also others that use electrodes placed on the surface of the brain in order to monitor neural activity.

Some are also intracortical devices. These devices capitalize on electrodes that are directly implanted into the tissue of the brain. This is where the implant of Neuralink falls under.

However, Neuralink is not the first one to engage in such efforts. Such intracortical BCIs have a standard system of electrodes known as the Utah Array. They are rectangular and small grids with silicon spikes.

Nevertheless, what Neuralink was able to accomplish was the condensation of several advances into a lone wireless, implantable, and intracortical device. Biomedical engineer and associate professor Jennifer Collinger from the University of Pittsburgh shared that the company was able to take the best of everything and consolidate them together.

The Link's electronic and circular hub connects to 64 threads that are superfine. These also consist of 1,024 electrodes. This is roughly 10 times the amount that the Utah Array carries.

The Link then uses Bluetooth to relay the brain's compressed neural data. An algorithm that is tuned to the unique neural pattern of the user then translates the information into output action.

Arbaugh was reportedly able to operate the digital cursor within a week post-surgery.

According to Neuralink, Arbaugh has seen record-breaking results for BCI cursor control. He has also reached a measure of eight bits per second, which integrates both accuracy and speed.

However, roughly a month post-surgery, significant functionality of Arbaugh's implant ended up getting lost. While he thought that it was a software problem at first, it was confirmed by the Neuralink team that this was a hardware issue.

Nevertheless, Neuralink was able to restore much of the functionality of the implant. They did so by adjustingthe algorithm to respond to the electrodes that transmitted data.

Moving forward, the US Food and Drug Administration has also granted their approval to the plans of Neuralink to proceed with their second human trial and implant.