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Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink’s first patient, says he now calls his brain implant “Eve.”
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In January, the Arizona resident became the first person to get Elon Musk’s brain implant.
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Seven months later, he says he’s using it to improve himself by learning French and Japanese.
Neuralink’s first patient says he’s given his brain-chip implant a name seven months after it was surgically implanted.
Noland Arbaugh, who is quadriplegic and became the first person to get the computer-controlling implant developed by Elon Musk’s brain-interface company, said Wednesday that he had named the device “Eve” and was working with it to improve himself in different ways.
Arbaugh wrote in a post on X that he spends about four hours a day in sessions with staff at Neuralink, Monday through Friday, testing the implant. In his free time, he uses the device to read, study the Bible, and learn languages.
“Currently, I’m learning French and Japanese for roughly three hours a day using a few different resources,” he said.
“I also decided to relearn my math from the ground up in preparation for hopefully going back to school one day,” Arbaugh added.
Arbaugh, who was paralyzed in 2016 from the shoulders down in what he previously called a “freak diving accident,” received Neuralink’s brain implant in January.
The chip captures the brain’s activity and sends it to a computer via Bluetooth, allowing the user to control the movement of a computer cursor and surf the web, play video games, and design 3D models — for example — by visualizing these things happening.
The surgery was initially successful, but in the following weeks, the device began to malfunction after several of its 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair, retracted away from his brain.
Arbaugh previously told Business Insider that the loss of functionality took an emotional toll on him. However, Neuralink wrote in a blog post in May that it was able to fix the issue, and Arbaugh says his implant is now working as intended.
Neuralink has ambitious plans for its brain chip, which it recently announced had been successfully implanted in a second patient.
Musk has said the company aims to implant the chip in thousands, perhaps millions, more patients within the next decade and that it could eventually be used to control prosthetic limbs in a “Luke Skywalker solution.”
The billionaire has also described Neuralink’s implant as crucial if humanity is to compete with superintelligent artificial intelligence, which he is trying to develop at his AI startup, xAI.
Now that the device’s functionality has been fully restored, Arbaugh said he was keen to return to college and either finish his degree or switch to studying neuroscience as he “might have some insight to the field at this point.”
The Arizona resident also has ambitions to publish his creative writing, start a charity, and build his parents a house one day.
“Ultimately, I’m having a blast and my life has improved so much in such a short time. It’s hard to even put into words,” Arbaugh said, signing off the post with “Noland & Eve, a.k.a. P1.”
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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