A Neuralink video shows a patient using a brain implant

Noland Arbaugh: Playing chess and video games with the Neuralink implant during a paralyzed fall

The patient, identified as 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, said he was injured in a diving accident eight years ago that paralyzed him below the shoulders. Arbaugh described using the Neuralink implant as similar to using the force from the Star Wars franchise, where he could just stare at the screen and move his mouse where he wanted.

The man broadcasted from social media, and said he was able to play online chess and the game Civilization using the Neuralink device. He said if people can see the screen moves, that is all him. “It’s pretty cool, huh?”

In the livestream, Arbaugh describes learning how to use the brain-computer interface. He said it was intuitive for him to start imagining theCursor moving because he would try to move his hand left, right, forward and back. While the livestream contained relatively few details, a Neuralink engineer said in the video that more information would be released in the coming days.

The company received a greenlight from the US Food and Drug Administration last year to move ahead with an initial human trial and began recruiting paralyzed participants in the fall to test the device.

In addition to playing chess, Arbaugh said the Neuralink implant had also allowed him to play the video game Civilization VI for eight hours straight, though he was limited by having to wait for the implant to charge. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Neuralink permission to conduct in-human clinical trials last year, and shortly afterwards the company announced that it was seeking test subjects for an initial six-year trial.

Neuralink has been criticized for the way it’s conducted its trials, with critics pointing towards a lack of transparency around elements like the number of subjects or what outcomes it’s assessing, Wired notes. The company’s previous experiments on monkeys have also been the subject of controversy, including reports that animals involved in the trials had to be euthanized after suffering complications including brain bleeds, “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema.”

Arbaugh admitted that “there’s still a lot of work to be done” and that the team “have run into some issues.” He said that the implant changed his life.