Six weeks ago, a 9-year-old macaque, Pager was hooked up to a Neuralink system – Elon Musk’s mind-machine interface company. He was trained to play video games in exchange of banana smoothie. Now the monkey is seen playing games like Ping-pong using only his brain.
The company recorded his activity during this time. They implanted more than 2,000 electrodes in his motor cortex to record his activity and fed them to machine-learning algorithms wirelessly.
Decoder algorithm sensed modulation in neurons of the monkey and permitted the system to predict movements of hands.
It was done with the help of a mathematical model of neural activity and the corresponding joystick movements.
Pager’s brain waves were monitored by the researchers to adjust the system. A joystick was manipulated by the monkey before disconnecting controller.
Pager is now playing the video game without any manual input and only with its brain.
The company’s main aim is to make paralyzed people able to use phone or PC with their brain only by manipulating a computer screen, a cursor or virtual keybord and touch controls.
First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
Musk also tweeted that he expects later iterations of the system to allow users to interact with their phone faster than they otherwise would use their hands.
The billionaire also claimed future iterations would allow for communication between neural links in various parts of a patient’s body, potentially one day allowing “paraplegics to walk again.”
The one-time world’s richest man added that his company is hoping to conduct human trials later this year.
Musk last demonstrated Neuralink’s capabilities in August 2020, showing pigs who had learnt to read signals based on a range of external stimuli.
Researchers have confirmed that the human brain continues working even after the death of a person. That seems a zombie-like behaviour, but researchers have found a non-zombie logic behind this phenomenon.
Meanwhile, a research team in Germany has achieved great success conducting experiments to create false memories in people’s minds and then erase them.
Even Bill Gates owned Microsoft has proposed a way to use your brainwaves to mine cryptocurrency.
The application explains how brain activity and personal biometric data of an individual can be used to generate cryptocurrency.
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