Neuralink Ilona Mask showed a video with a monkey playing a video game with the power of thought

In February, Elon Musk shared the success of its neurotechnology company Neuralink, whose specialists managed to implant a neural chip into the monkey's brain. This implant allowed the primate to play video games with literal power of thought. Today, April 9, the first demo video was released.

In the video, the monkey first plays a game where it had to move the cursor after the orange square. She does it with a joystick. However, after this control was removed, the game MindPong (ping-pong simulator) was turned on. In it, she controlled a racket using brain signals read by an implanted chip.

On his blog Neuralink toldthat the implant in a macaque is placed in the area of ​​the so-called motor cortex of the brain - it is she who is responsible for planning, controlling and performing voluntary movements.

The entire system was trained and calibrated on the game using a joystick, so that later the chip could read neural activity and predict the expected actions of the monkey. In other words, the implant recognizes brain signals and sends a command to the computer via Bluetooth to perform the corresponding action.

Motion prediction can be used not only for these kinds of games, but also to steer a computer's course or even interact with a complex virtual interface. This is exactly what the startup Neuralink is heading for.

With the help of such implants, developers want to teach paralyzed people to control computers and mobile gadgets. This will require the calibration of a chip on the human cortex. In theory, this would allow people with disabilities to type emails or scroll through web pages with just the power of thought.

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