Noland Arbaugh, 29 years old, lost movement in his body from the neck down when he had an accident while diving in 2018. However, he is still able to play video games due to a device implanted in his brain: a computer chip. Neuralink. He is the first patient of the company co-founded by Elon Musk to have the implant.
“Anything that makes me more independent, I’m all for. It will probably make people like me more independent than they’ll ever be until everything is cured – and I think that’s a very real possibility,” the patient said during an all-hands meeting with the Neuralink team, according to the website Business Insider.
According to Bliss Chapman, the company’s brain interface software leader, the first things Arbaugh wanted to do after the implant was play the video game. Mario Kart or Beerio Kart (a pastime that involves drinking a beer while playing game from Nintendo).
Your dream came true: on March 22ndhttps://twitter.com/ModdedQuad/status/1771298116719002100?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1771298116719002100%7Ctwgr%5Ef2b72d049c09c7beaec2b1d72b36037081dcf54e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-2040655140552332827.ampproject.net%2F2403072016000%2Fframe.html (formerly Twitter) where he appears playing the famous car game played by the character Mário. In the filming, it is possible to see a split screen of Donkey Kong and Bowser (characters from Mario Kart) at minute 18:07.
Arbaugh plays with Bowser (player on the right) who, in addition to following the lines of the race track, manages to knock down another player – all of this being controlled solely by the patient’s mind. Right away, at minute 20:35, you can see him playing Mario Kart 8 with your father. Look:
Previously, Neuralink posted on X one https://twitter.com/neuralink/status/1770563939413496146 Chapman said he had already published the recording of Arbaugh playing Mario Kart on an internal company channel for people to vote for the player they believed was being controlled by a brain-computer interface (BCI).
“What you see is a father and son playing Mario Kart – something I grew up doing all the time with my parents, something I did a lot with my friends growing up, and something that wasn’t possible until this happened,” said the Neuralink spokesperson.
“I think the contrast between the normality and the absolute absurdity of doing this using the brain-computer interface (BCI) is something to marvel at and absorb for a second,” the software lead added.
