The Story of a Man Using Neuralink to Play a Game and Play Chess: Noland Arbaugh, 51, Has Already Done His Brain Implant

The video marks the first time Neuralink has shared footage of a human using its brain implant, after Musk announced in January that the first trial participant was “recovering well” after having the technology implanted. Three years ago, the company released a video showing a monkey using its technology to play a game.

In a brief livestream on the social media platform X, the man introduced himself as Noland Arbaugh, and said he’s able to play online chess and the video game Civilization using the Neuralink device. “If y’all can see the cursor moving around the screen, that’s all me,” he said during the livestream as he moved a digital chess piece. It’s pretty cool.

Arbaugh talks about how to use the brain- computer interface. He said it was intuitive for him to imagine theCursor moving, as he tried to move his hand left and right, forward and back. A Neuralink engineer promised in the video that more information would be released in the coming days.

The company received a greenlight from the US Food and Drug Administration last year to move ahead with an initial human trial and began recruiting paralyzed participants in the fall to test the device.

In addition to playing chess, Arbaugh said the Neuralink implant had also allowed him to play the video game Civilization VI for eight hours straight, though he was limited by having to wait for the implant to charge. The FDA gave Neuralink permission last year to conduct human clinical trials, and after that the company announced it was seeking test subjects for an initial six-year trial.

Neuralink has been criticized for the way it’s conducted its trials, with critics pointing towards a lack of transparency around elements like the number of subjects or what outcomes it’s assessing, Wired notes. The company’s previous experiments on monkeys have also been the subject of controversy, including reports that animals involved in the trials had to be euthanized after suffering complications including brain bleeds, “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema.”

Arbaugh admitted that “there’s still a lot of work to be done” and that the team “have run into some issues.” But he also says that the implant “has already changed my life.”