The first human patient of Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company Neuralink is keeping busy seven months after having a small chip implanted in his skull.
Noland Arbaugh, who lost control over his limbs after a diving accident eight years ago, even has a new nickname for the tiny coin-shaped device: "Eve."
In a lengthy post on X-formerly-Twitter, Arbaugh revealed that he's spending roughly three hours a day learning French and Japanese using the gadget. He's even "decided to relearn my math from the ground up in preparation for hopefully going back to school one day."
Outside of personal projects, he's spending roughly four hours a day, five days a week with Neuralink staff, which involves him "doing lots of experiments on a daily basis to try and make everything better for all those who come after me."
Arbaugh had the chip implanted earlier this year and has since learned to move a cursor with his mind, even allowing him to play video games.
But months into the experiment, Arbaugh noticed that he started losing much of the chip's functionality. Neuralink engineers discovered that some of the threads connecting the chip to his brain had retracted. Fortunately, Neuralink managed to intervene by making adjustments to the algorithm and recovering much of the functionality.
The company also claims it has fixed the issue with its second human patient by embedding the threads even deeper.
Now that much of the functionality has been restored, Arbaugh is hoping to go back to his alma mater to finish his degree or switch to neuroscience, since he "might have some insight to the field at this point."
Arbaugh has big hopes for the brain chip and the things it could enable him to do one day. In an earlier tweet, he revealed that "we're waiting for FDA approval allowing me to control other physical machines such as a car, a drone, maybe a robot or two or 10,000."
"Something about making sure it's safe..." he added jokingly.
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