Neuralink reveals first human-trial patient, a 29-year-old quadriplegic who says brain chip is 'not perfect' but has changed his life

• Elon Musk's neural-technology company, Neuralink, has been working on brain-chip implants.

• Musk announced in January that the company implanted a chip into its first human patient.

• It revealed its first patient, Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old quadriplegic, during a livestream.

Neuralink, Elon Musk's neural-technology company, revealed during a livestream on Wednesday that a 29-year-old man who was paralyzed after a diving accident is the first human to have received its brain-chip implant.

The patient, Noland Arbaugh, said during the livestream on X, Musk's social-media company, that the chip was "not perfect" but it had already added many improvements to his life, such as giving him the ability to play video games for hours without having to rely on help from his family.

"It's not perfect," Arbaugh said. "I would say we have run into some issues. I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey. There's a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life."

Bliss Chapman, an engineer at Neuralink, joined Arbaugh for the livestream. The company, launched in 2016, has been working on a chip implant that could allow people to control computers with their brains.

Musk first announced in January that Neuralink had implanted one of its chips into a human for the first time, following several years of tests conducted on animals.

Those animal experiments had been the subject of scrutiny after the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a medical-ethics group, accused the company of putting monkeys through "extreme suffering as a result of inadequate animal care and the highly invasive experimental head implants during the experiments."

PCRM asked the US regulators to investigate Musk for securities fraud after he posted on X that "No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant." Musk later said that Neuralink's facilities were like "monkey paradise."

PCRM said in a letter to the SEC that "Musk knows that to be false." The SEC has not indicated whether it's investigating Neuralink.

During the livestream, Arbaugh sat in a specialized chair in front of a laptop.

He appeared to be playing a game of chess while his hands remained on the armrests of his chair.

"I love playing chess and so this is one of the things that y'all have enabled me to do — something that I wasn't able to really do much the last few years, especially not like this," he said. "I had to use a mouse stick and stuff, but now it's all being done with my brain."

Arbaugh said he had dislocated parts of his spinal cord in a "freak diving accident" about eight years ago that left him paralyzed from below the shoulders.

His condition limited his ability to play his favorite video game, "Civilization VI," because he could only play a few hours at a time before he would need help from his family to readjust his seated position.

"I had basically given up on playing that game," he said, adding that it's a "big game" that requires a lot of time sitting still. "I have to worry about a lot of things — getting pressure sores and things like that. So I just wasn't really able to play it as much as I wanted to."

With the chip, Arbaugh said he has been able to play the video game for several hours while lying in his bed.

Arbaugh noted that the "biggest restriction" so far was having to charge the implant after playing video games for a long time.

He said that controlling Neuralink soon became "intuitive," and that to move the computer cursor, for example, he only needed to imagine the cursor moving.

In a comparison to the "Star Wars" movies, he said it's "like using the Force on a cursor."

Read the original article on Business Insider