Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

Summary

It was February 2024 when Noland Arbaugh, the first person to get Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip, rolled across the stage in a wheelchair during a Neuralink “all hands” meeting, revealing his identity for the first time. The room, filled with Neuralink employees, erupted in applause as Arbaugh—who dislocated two of his vertebrae in a swimming accident in 2016 and has since lost sensation and movement below his shoulders—smiled ear to ear in his chair, a red Texas A&M hat planted on his head. He grinned as he began to speak: “Hello, humans.” About a month before that town hall, Arbaugh, who’s 31, had undergone surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, about 2.5 hours from his home in Yuma, to get an experimental chip embedded into his brain that Neuralink had been working on and testing on animals for the past nine years. Arbaugh was anesthetized and, in a surgery that lasted just under two hours, a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI, or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body. The first day that Arbaugh used his device, he beat the 2017 world record for speed and precision in BCI cursor control. “It was very, very easy to learn how to use,” he tells me in an interview. When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and a dozen compa...