This week, Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk that specialises in neural interface technology, unveiled a fairly astonishing example of its work.
In a video released Thursday, the company showed off how far its come testing its technology on primates. In the video, a macaque monkey named Pager, which Neuralink claims has had a chip implanted in his brain for six weeks, is able to play video games like Pong purely via the chip. Playing the games correctly meant Pager was rewarded with a sip of banana smoothie.
This is, objectively, pretty amazing. As Musk put it in an excited tweet on Thursday: "A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip!!"
Perhaps even more amazing: monkeys have been playing video games with their minds for almost 20 years.
"Brain-control of computer cursors by monkeys is not new," Professor Andrew Jackson of the University of Newcastle told Insider, adding that the first comparable demonstrations of technology like Neuralink's took place in 2002.
A group of researchers in 2002 were able to show they could get a monkey to move a cursor on a computer screen at will, noting at the time that the technology could be used to help paralyzed people control screens in a similar way.
Jackson added the idea behind the technology dates back as far as the 1960s. In 1969, a researcher called Eberhard Fetz connected a needle on a meter to a single neuron in a monkey's brain, and was able to train the monkey to move that needle using only its brain activity.
Neuralink, which was founded in 2016, is developing a microchip, which theoretically, would be implanted in a person's skull, from which wires would fan out into their brain. These wires would be able to record brain activity, as well as stimulate areas of the brain.
The idea is that these chips could help study and treat neurological diseases and conditions in the near term. In the long term, Musk says they form part of his ideal of a "symbiosis" between human consciousness and AI (although experts have frequently expressed skepticism about this part).
Musk has been hyping up the monkey for years — but neuroscientists haven't been that impressed
Musk first gave the world a hint about Neuralink's tests on monkeys during a streamed presentation of the company's designs in 2019.
"A monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain, just FYI," he said, appearing to take Neuralink president Max Kodak by surprise with the announcement. "The monkey's going to come out of the bag," Musk joked.
Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, told Insider in 2019 that he was not surprised Neuralink had been able to achieve that result — and accurately predicted the kind of telepathic monkey computer-usage which Neuralink showed off in its video on Friday.
"The monkey is not surfing the internet. The monkey is probably moving a cursor to move a little ball to try to match a target," Hires said. This pretty well exactly matches one of the games Pager was shown playing in the video released Thursday.
Musk started to hype up the monkey again earlier this year. "We've already got a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull ... who can play video games using his mind," he said during an interview on Clubhouse on January 31.
Musk is a canny marketer, and he's very familiar with using his own peculiar brand of fame to merchandise and advertise his companies. It's worth noting that at the end of the video with a call for people to apply for jobs at Neuralink — making for an ingenious recruitment strategy.
Neuralink is still doing new things, and the monkey is important
While neuroscientists have said the underlying science of getting a monkey to play video games with its mind is not revolutionary, they have praised the engineering of Neuralink's wireless chip.
Speaking to Insider in September 2020 (following a presentation in which Neuralink showed off its technology working after being implanted in the brain of a pig) Professor Jackson said the development of any neural interface technology that doesn't require wires to protrude out of the skin is a good thing, as it reduces the risk of infection.
"Just from a welfare aspect for the animals, I think if you can do experiments with something that doesn't involve wires coming through the skin, that's going to improve the welfare of animals," he said, adding that further down the road it could have benefits for humans as well.
Responding to the video released on Thursday of Pager the monkey, Jackson said while it's not earth-shattering, it is an important proof of concept.
"I certainly do not mean to criticise them for demonstrating something that has been done before. It is a sensible way to validate any new technology. If you invent a new telescope, it makes sense to first point it where you know what you will see. So they are following a very sensible route to validate their device," Jackson said.
Rylie Green, a bioengineering researcher at Imperial College London, told Insider: "The best thing I can see from that video is that the macaque is freely moving. There's also no visible package connected to it. I would say that is definitely progress — not super innovative but a nice positive step forward."
