Cyborg beat me. When I played the online game WebGrid, I pressed my finger on the laptop trackpad and clicked on the squares that appeared unpredictably on the grid. My speed was 42 squares per minute. When Noland Abau, who introduced himself as Cyborg, played, he used a chip embedded in his brain to send telepathic signals to the computer. His speed? 49.
Arbaugh was paralyzed from the neck down in 2016. In January, he became the first person to be surgically implanted with a chip made by Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk. Since then, Arbaugh has been using his mind to control his phone and computer, surf the web, and play games. Civilization And chess.
But Neuralink isn’t the only company using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to merge human minds with machines. A series of experiments have seen people who have been paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, strokes, or motor impairments regain more and more abilities. Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University in California, says the success has caught some researchers by surprise. “It’s been an incredible journey.”
It’s unclear where this will take us. Musk recently mused about building bio-implants that could rival artificial superintelligence. Others are pondering more profound implications. “In the future, we could manipulate human perception, memory, behavior, and identity,” says Raphael Yuste of Columbia University in New York.
But as Arbaugh’s WebGrid scores show, while BCIs are certainly impressive, the relationship between brain activity, thought, and behavior is incredibly complex. Memory…
