Elon Musk-led Neuralink, a startup that is into developing implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers, has released a video in which a monkey can be seen playing a video game using only its mind. Musk himself took to Twitter to share the video of the Pager, a nine-year-old macaque monkey, playing MindPong.
Pager had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks before the video was filmed. "We have implanted the Link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed Links bilaterally: one in the left motor cortex (which controls movements of the right side of the body) and another in the right motor cortex (which controls the left side of the body)," Neuralink stated. Neurons in somatosensory cortex respond to touch, and neurons in the visual cortex respond to visual cues.
In its demonstration, Neuralink showed how it used its sensor hardware and brain implant to record a baseline of activity from Pager as it played a game on-screen where it had to move a token to different squares using a joystick with its hand. Using that baseline data, Neuralink was able to use machine learning to anticipate where Pager was going to be moving the physical controller, and was eventually able to predict it accurately before the move was actually made.
The company has demonstrated that by modeling the relationship between different patterns of neural activity and intended movement directions, it can build a model that can predict the direction and speed of an upcoming or intended movement. "We can go further than simply predicting the most likely intended movement given the current pattern of brain activity: we can use these predictions to control, in real time, the movements of a computer cursor, or in the video below, a MindPong paddle. The neurons with upward preferred directions clearly increase their firing rates as the monkey moves his MindPong paddle upward, and the ones with downward preferred directions increase their firing rates as Pager moves his paddle downward," the company explained on its website.
The goal, according to Neuralink, is to enable people with paralysis to directly use their neural activity to operate computers and mobile devices with speed and ease. That could be applied to other paradigms as well, including touch controls on an iPhone, and even typing using a virtual keyboard.
