Neuralink showed a macaque that plays computer games with the power of thought. Video

[zakiyatasnim]

Ever since the world-famous eccentric billionaire announced that he would be working on neurointerfaces, the public has been waiting in anticipation for another high-tech show. As usual, a little time had to be added to the promised deadlines, but progress is being made. We've already seen a robot that can connect directly to the brain and microchip pigs, now it's time for a monkey that plays on a computer literally with the power of thought.



A video appeared on the official Neuralink YouTube channel today, in which a macaque named Pager uses a neural interface to control a computer. The experiment seems quite simple. A banana smoothie is used as positive reinforcement, which is fed through a long tube. If the monkey hovers over a colored square, it receives a portion of treats. The game is quite simple: you need to hit the target with the pointer.

the experimental animal controls the cursor using a joystick, and the computer analyzes the electrical activity of the brain. But then the real fantasy happens: the joystick is physically disconnected from the lithuania number data computer. The monkey continues to move it, but this signal is no longer transmitted to the pointer, it is controlled by the brain-computer interface. The task is still performed, since the nerve impulses remain the same and Neuralink simply interprets them into the movement of the cursor on the screen.



If you watch the video carefully, you can see that in some cases the pointer hits the square even before the macaque's hand moves the joystick. But a couple of times the system gives a small glitch, and it takes a while to aim. We were also shown a second game, which is even more interesting. In it, the joystick is not used at all: the monkey must control the ping-pong "racket" only mentally. According to the announcer, Pager likes this entertainment much more.

As the voiceover notes, the implantation of the neurointerface took place about six weeks before filming. Pager received two Neuralink modules at once: one for each hemisphere. And the only thing that betrays the recent surgery is the hair that has not fully grown back. The very small "pills" of the promising device are implanted into the skull flush with the outer surface of the bone. After the sutures heal, the implantation of the brain-computer interface will be completely invisible from the outside.



The Neuralink implant charges wirelessly and connects to any compatible device via Bluetooth. The dataset it transmits can be seen in a few frames of the first video, or in much more detail in the second. It shows a spectrogram of the signals read by the neural interface synchronized with a recording of a monkey playing ping-pong. The company posted this additional video on its blog, which details the project’s current progress.