'Literally playing': Elon Musk reveals how Neuralink made monkey play video game

As Elon Musk on April 8 shared a picture of a monkey playing Ping Pong with its mind, several internet users flooded the comment section with reactions and questions related to Neuralink. Self-appointed “technoking” Musk, unveiled a new video of a nine-year-old monkey named “Pager” learning to control a computer with his brain activity. In the clip, the narrator stated that Pager has two Neuralink devices implanted in his brain and further informed that the Neuralink devices recorded information about which neurons were firing as the monkey played the game. 

In a series of tweets, Musk first said that the monkey is “literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip”. In the following posts, the Tesla CEO then said that the first Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs. He further also informed that later versions will also be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again. 

Netizen call it ‘amazing’ 

Following Musk’s tweets, while one Twitter user jokingly wrote, “Will I be able to know what my parents are thinking at all times if they have it,” another asked, “...could I input a neural memory of how to play "Fur Elise" and my fingers receive the impulses and play it?”. One user simply said, “That’s literally amazing”. “Hearing about it is cool but I'm pretty excited to watch someone disabled walk again with this tech. Godspeed sir,” wrote fourth. 

Meanwhile, back in February Musk had teased Neuralink had wired up a monkey's brain to play video games during a Clubhouse meeting. Calling it a ‘primitive’ Neuralink idea, Musk said that eventually one morning the humanity would wake up to a mind not the same and an individual could decide whether they would want to be a “robot or a person". In the chatroom, Tesla’s CEO said that he believes people were already ‘cyborg’, and have a ‘tertiary layer in the form of smartphones'. He stressed enhancing the human brain and technologically revolutionizing the mind with AI, stressing that the brain required a direct neural interface to increase the magnitude of ‘processing’.

(Image: AP/Twitter)