Noland Arbaugh still doesn’t quite know what happened. He doesn’t know many of the key details about how his life took such a drastic and now extraordinary turn. How he became Noland Arbaugh, celebrity cyborg.
It was mid-2016, and he had his first day off as a sports counselor at the Island Lake Camp in Starrucca, Pennsylvania. Arbaugh, then a student at Texas A&M University, had spent two previous summers working at the kids camp. The people and surroundings, including a nearby man-made lake, were familiar, and this day was like many before it. He’d planned to go to the lake with a group of friends.
There were already people in the water when Arbaugh and his companions arrived. After chatting with his friends on shore, Arbaugh and a couple of other guys made a dash for the water to join everyone else. Their plan was to run in and dunk some girls frolicking in the lake. “We all just jumped in together just like you would do going into the ocean,” Arbaugh says. “And the two guys got up out of the water, and they went over and picked up the girls and stuff like that. And I just never came back up.”
Somehow when Arbaugh jumped in, something or someone—he’s still not sure what—bashed into the left side of his head and knocked him out for a moment. As he came to, face down in the water, he tried to move but couldn’t. An inexplicable calm came over him. Arbaugh knew right away that he was paralyzed and that there was nothing he could do about it. He pondered his predicament as he held his breath. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. No one seemed to be nearby, and he couldn’t hold out any longer. “I thought, ‘Well, now is as good of a time as ever,’” he says. “I basically took a big drink of water and passed out.”
Two fellow counselors spotted Arbaugh and pulled him from the lake. He woke up on the shore, then passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in an ambulance where a paramedic speculated aloud that Arbaugh had been paralyzed from the neck down and said that he would soon be transferred to a helicopter and taken to a hospital. Then he passed out again. When he woke up at the hospital, Arbaugh was being prepped for surgery to deal with what would soon be confirmed as a dislocated spine. Groggy but still unpanicked, he requested just before the anesthesia hit that the nurses wait to call his mother, Mia Neely, until the procedure was done. He figured that it’d be better for the doctors to have concrete news on whether he’d died or survived instead of making his mom worry during the operation.
The accident at the lake turned the 22-year-old’s life upside down. He had to learn how to get around in his motorized wheelchair, puffing and sucking into a tube with varying force to make the machine move in different directions. He also had to figure out how to poke at an iPad with a stick he holds in his mouth to use a computer. A lot of his and his family’s time was spent dealing with hospitals and insurance providers and caregivers.
In January, Arbaugh became the first person to receive a brain implant built by Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. as part of a clinical trial. The device won’t help Arbaugh move again, but it does offer the promise of helping him overcome some of his physical limitations by allowing him to control his laptop just by thinking the commands. He’s already been zipping around the web and communicating with friends using the implant instead of tapping at his iPad.
While other people have had similar devices implanted, Arbaugh has become the most public recipient. Part of this is because of the enormous attention that surrounds everything that Musk does. Arbaugh is sharing his story here for the first time. Obviously he isn’t happy about being paralyzed. But he says that it happened for a reason and that dedicating his body to science in this way is part of God’s plan for him.
Now 30, Arbaugh lives with his mother, stepdad, David Neely, and half-brother, Tavita, in Yuma, Arizona. They have a modest manufactured home just off a dirt road in a neighborhood surrounded by desert and scrub brush. Out back, the family has coops for chickens, roosters, quail and turkeys, as well as a large pen holding several Nigerian dwarf goats.
As a kid, Arbaugh played sports and joined his school band and chess team. He had a close-knit group of friends and found school easy—so easy, in fact, that he’d often skip class and simply show up for tests, which he usually aced. He then went off to Texas A&M, pursuing political science and international studies while taking part in the Corps of Cadets military program the school offered. A couple years in, Arbaugh began skipping class more often and spent most of his time bartending and hanging out with friends. “I eventually wanted to travel and be a nomad gypsy and do a whole lot of nothing,” he says.
Those plans, of course, all dissipated because of the accident. But Arbaugh, who comes off as an easygoing, smart young man, talks about his injury and the travails of his condition in a matter-of-fact, patient manner through a light, y’all-happy drawl that he must have acquired during his time in Texas. He has a mustache and small loop earnings in both lobes. Now and again, Arbaugh’s body will spasm, and he’ll ask Tavita, who’s 23, for help to stretch out his arm or leg after it’s been contorted into a tricky position, a ritual the pair has clearly performed many times.
Arbaugh still had his friends and family after the accident, but he spent a few years trying to find his place in the world. At times he felt helpless, like he was a burden. Although he applied for jobs, he couldn’t peck away at his iPad fast enough to meet the typing speed criteria. “It’s hard for me to do a lot,” he says. “I’ve tried other things, and I just can’t hack it.” He considered completing his college degree but couldn’t get his transcripts from the school because of outstanding student loans that he cannot pay. “I was sure that I was going to stay with my parents as long as they could have me, and then, at some point, I would be put in a home, and there’s nothing I could do about it,” Arbaugh says.
Then in September of last year, he got a call from his cadets roommate, Greg Bain. Bain had read that Neuralink was looking for the first patient to try out its brain implant. Arbaugh had never heard of Neuralink, so Bain walked him through the basic idea. The brain-computer interface implant had the potential to give paralyzed people a way of interacting with computers via their thoughts alone. “I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds pretty cool,’” Arbaugh says.
Bain helped Arbaugh fill out an online questionnaire about the nature of his injury, how much movement he was still capable of, if he smoked or drank or did drugs, if he had any other medical conditions and so on. Arbaugh had never been a heavy drinker or smoker, but he’d quit altogether about two years earlier, part of a regimen of self-improvement that also involved studying math and science and languages and listening to a steady stream of audiobooks. “I just decided that I wanted to start doing something with my life, and it made me feel productive,” he says.
Neuralink contacted Arbaugh the next day and soon began conducting phone interviews. Several weeks later the company asked him to show up at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for in-person tests that would, among other things, measure the thickness of his skull and the amount of space between his brain and skull. A veteran of medical bureaucracy and delays, Arbaugh took pleasure in seeing that an entire wing had been cleared to keep his arrival secret and that the tests were done in rapid-fire fashion by a team of doctors and nurses focused just on him. While no final decision had yet been made, some of the people at the hospital began hinting to Arbaugh that he was the lead candidate.
“It was awesome, because you could see how excited everyone was,” he says. “You could feel this energy. It was weird, because they kept telling me what an honor it was to meet me and how I was doing the greatest thing in the world. It was very surreal.” In January, Neuralink informed Arbaugh that he would indeed be the first person to receive the implant.
When you’re paralyzed from the neck down, the last vestige of normalcy that you have left comes from your brain. Arbaugh was allowing Neuralink direct, physical access to his, in a procedure that came with all the standard risks of serious surgery as well as the unknown risks of something so new. Doctors would be removing part of his skull and sticking Neuralink’s coin-size device with its electrode-laced threads—a foreign object that had never before been tested on humans—into his brain.
Arbaugh received the blessing of his mom and stepdad, who’d still be the ones caring for him if something went wrong. He also spent hours debating the merits of the procedure with Bain and other friends. One friend warned him that Musk has a “track record of being for progress above everything else,” Arbaugh says. “That he wants to make things happen and doesn’t care what happens along the way.” Another friend brought up the negative stories that have surrounded Neuralink’s implant tests on animals and argued that Arbaugh might suffer some type of horrible consequence as a result of the procedure.
Arbaugh, a Musk fan, pushed back. He questioned the credibility of the stories about the animals. He had also read a story about Musk’s behavior the night before SpaceX launched humans into space for the first time. Musk couldn’t sleep and prayed for the safety of the astronauts, despite not being a religious man. “That really put me at ease,” Arbaugh says. “It made me feel like he would not do this if he felt like it was going to end badly.”
Mostly, Arbaugh says, his faith pushed him ahead. He’s sure that God led him to quit smoking and drinking because that made him eligible for the trial, and he’s sure that God picked Barrow Neurological Institute as the place where the surgery would occur because it’s just a couple hours from his home, which made the whole thing feasible. “I wasn’t worried at all,” Arbaugh says. “I saw so many dots connecting for me that were fitting into this. My accident was such a freak accident, and I’d wondered why it had happened to me and what God had in store for me. When I started doing all the Neuralink stuff, I was like, ‘OK, well, this is it.’”
Arbaugh arrived at the hospital on Sunday, Jan. 28, at around 5 a.m. Musk had planned to meet him before the procedure, but he had issues with his private jet. The two men instead had a brief FaceTime chat, and Musk arrived at the hospital while the procedure was underway.
The surgery lasted less than two hours. As Arbaugh woke up, he saw his mother hovering over him. They locked eyes and held the stare for several beats, and Mia Neely asked if he was OK. “And he says, ‘Who are you? I don’t know who this is,’” Neely recalls. She broke into tears and was trying to get the attention of a doctor when she caught a smirk on Arbaugh’s face. He’d planned the gag ahead of time. “I wanted to let her know that everything was OK and to ease the tension,” Arbaugh says.
For about two decades, researchers have run experiments on humans with devices similar in concept to Neuralink’s, but they’ve been bulky and typically require a medical team to help operate them. As a result, the implants are almost always used in hospital and laboratory settings. Over the past few years, a handful of startups have developed more modern takes on these products and how to implant them. All of these companies want to use the implants to help people with debilitating conditions control machines in non-hospital settings.
The implants operate by gathering data as the brain’s neurons fire. With the help of artificial intelligence software, it’s possible to match specific patterns of neuronal activity with certain actions and translate that data into actions that take place on a computer. While Arbaugh can’t move his hands, for instance, he can think about moving his hands. The Neuralink implant can identify what that looks like, then transmit the intention to a nearby laptop or smartphone, allowing him to move a cursor around the screen. This means Arbaugh can play games, shop, choose audiobooks and generally interact with the online world much as anyone else can.
Most brain implant startups use technology that relies on placing electrodes near, but not quite right up against, someone’s neurons. One example is a device from Synchron that can nestle into a blood vessel in the brain through a relatively safe procedure that doesn’t require cutting into the skull. Precision Neuroscience has a product that sits on top of the brain’s surface. To get clearer signals, Neuralink slides electronic threads directly into the brain tissue, an approach that requires more invasive surgery. The primary objective of Arbaugh’s trial is to make sure that the procedure to place the implant is safe and that the device can stay in someone’s head for a long time without causing damage.
In addition to getting closer to the action, Neuralink’s device has many more electrodes than most of its rivals’ and much more data bandwidth. With the higher bandwidth, the implant can receive a richer signal from the brain, allowing someone like Arbaugh to navigate his computer faster and more effectively than he would with another product. If such technology works well, it could be a huge boon to people who suffer not just from paralysis but also from conditions such as ALS and strokes where their ability to move and communicate has been compromised.
In the first couple of weeks after returning home, Arbaugh had members of Neuralink’s team in his living room and kitchen to test the device. In research settings, brain implant patients usually need to rest after two to four hours because of mental and physical strain, but Arbaugh would go for up to 10 hours. The device also outperformed its predecessors. From Day 1, he began breaking speed records on the typical battery of tests used to benchmark the performance of brain-computer interface implants.
The world began to reopen for Arbaugh. He could play games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and chess with relative ease. He could hop between websites and audiobooks on his computer. And he could do all of this while lying in bed, which was far more comfortable and less spasm-inducing than sitting in his wheelchair and trying to get his mouth stick aligned just so with his iPad.
In the early days, Arbaugh had to learn how to tune Neuralink’s software to his brain patterns and get the gist of turning thoughts into action. As the weeks went by, the process became second nature. Arbaugh could carry on a conversation with someone while playing chess at the same time. It seemed like he’d developed a superpower.
But about a month into the practice sessions he found he had less precise control of the cursor on his screen and noticed a lag between his thoughts and the computing actions. These issues were the result of the electrode-laced threads in Arbaugh’s brain shifting around much more than Neuralink had seen during its animal trials. This disrupted the quality of the connections between his mind and his computer. His superpower began to fade.
The company has yet to disclose detailed information on what it believes caused the threads to move so much. One issue could be that the human brain is bigger than animal brains and sloshes around more. Arbaugh also has a thicker-than-average skull, which may have affected the way the threads settled into his tissue. Arbaugh will continue using the current version of the implant, but it’s likely that Neuralink will adjust its surgical procedures, and possibly parts of the implant itself, to address the problems as it heads toward testing the device on more patients this year.
Technology products almost always improve over time; Arbaugh had talked with Bain about how he would be receiving what was probably the worst Neuralink implant that anyone would get. But Arbaugh had agreed to the trial precisely because these types of issues could occur. He wanted to be a means for helping other people by aiding Neuralink in its quest to root out any of the implant’s flaws. Still, that didn’t make the loss of his newfound abilities any less painful.
“I started losing control of the cursor. I thought they’d made some changes and that was the reason," Arbaugh says. “But then they told me that the threads were getting pulled out of my brain. At first, they didn’t know how serious it would be or a ton about it.
“It was really hard to hear. I thought I’d gotten to use it for maybe a month, and then my journey was coming to an end. I thought they would just keep collecting some data but that they were really going to move on to the next person. I cried a little bit.”
Neuralink set to work trying to see what it could do to fix the issues. Its software engineers tweaked the algorithms that record data from Arbaugh’s neurons and made changes to the way that data gets analyzed and transferred to his computer. Arbaugh is now back to setting records. “I bet the next person that gets this is going to feel exactly the same way as I do,” he says. “Once you get a taste for using it, you just can’t stop. It blows my mind so much.”
Arbaugh taps into his implant 10 to 12 hours a day, only giving it a rest when it’s charging or when he’s sleeping. He begins each morning by reading an online devotional from the Gateway Church in Texas on his laptop and then assesses the state of his fantasy baseball roster. He’s still studying and churning through audiobooks and playing a lot of video games.
There is something magical about seeing Arbaugh in action. He used to perform a lot of his day-to-day tasks with a combination of voice commands and his mouth stick. If he had an audiobook playing, he couldn’t use speech-to-text functions to communicate unless he stopped the book, had some help with his mouth stick and hopped over to a new application. Now he goes from application to application with ease.
Neely, a youth pastor, sometimes can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’ll be streaming a show alongside Arbaugh in his bedroom while he’s playing a video game—with his mind. The biggest win for her, however, is that Arbaugh is happier and in less pain, because he can use his computer in whatever position is most comfortable for him. “We see the side of this where there’s not the hurting and the constant going in to adjust him and him shooting out his mouthpiece because he’s so frustrated,” she says. “It’s just so awesome. It’s a blessing.”
Arbaugh named his implant Eve in part, he says, because God presented Eve to Adam as his helper. Recently, he’s begun tracing letters on his computer screen with a cursor he controls through the implant. It’s the first stage of training Neuralink’s software to recognize the words that Arbaugh is thinking. The hope for Arbaugh is that he’ll soon be able to think entire sentences and have the software know what he’s trying to say. He’s long dreamed of being a fantasy writer and would like to write a novel.
Beyond that, Arbaugh isn’t totally sure what to do with his time in the limelight. He’d like to find a way to make a living from this experience, so he’s less dependent on his family and they won’t have to tend to him quite as much. “My brother has been caring for me for eight years,” Arbaugh says. “He needs to go live his life.” If fortune allowed it, he’d really like to make enough money to build his mom a house as a thank-you for everything she’s done for him.
Arbaugh has agreed to keep the device in his head and to provide data to Neuralink for a year. After that, he and the company will discuss whether he wants to have the device deactivated or even removed. Arbaugh suspects that he’ll want to keep it and even move on to the next version of the product when one is ready. “I’d want to upgrade,” he says. “Hopefully, they’ll put me on the short list.”
Article
It was mid-2016, and he had his first day off as a sports counselor at the Island Lake Camp in Starrucca, Pennsylvania. Arbaugh, then a student at Texas A&M University, had spent two previous summers working at the kids camp. The people and surroundings, including a nearby man-made lake, were familiar, and this day was like many before it. He’d planned to go to the lake with a group of friends.
There were already people in the water when Arbaugh and his companions arrived. After chatting with his friends on shore, Arbaugh and a couple of other guys made a dash for the water to join everyone else. Their plan was to run in and dunk some girls frolicking in the lake. “We all just jumped in together just like you would do going into the ocean,” Arbaugh says. “And the two guys got up out of the water, and they went over and picked up the girls and stuff like that. And I just never came back up.”
Somehow when Arbaugh jumped in, something or someone—he’s still not sure what—bashed into the left side of his head and knocked him out for a moment. As he came to, face down in the water, he tried to move but couldn’t. An inexplicable calm came over him. Arbaugh knew right away that he was paralyzed and that there was nothing he could do about it. He pondered his predicament as he held his breath. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. No one seemed to be nearby, and he couldn’t hold out any longer. “I thought, ‘Well, now is as good of a time as ever,’” he says. “I basically took a big drink of water and passed out.”
Two fellow counselors spotted Arbaugh and pulled him from the lake. He woke up on the shore, then passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in an ambulance where a paramedic speculated aloud that Arbaugh had been paralyzed from the neck down and said that he would soon be transferred to a helicopter and taken to a hospital. Then he passed out again. When he woke up at the hospital, Arbaugh was being prepped for surgery to deal with what would soon be confirmed as a dislocated spine. Groggy but still unpanicked, he requested just before the anesthesia hit that the nurses wait to call his mother, Mia Neely, until the procedure was done. He figured that it’d be better for the doctors to have concrete news on whether he’d died or survived instead of making his mom worry during the operation.
The accident at the lake turned the 22-year-old’s life upside down. He had to learn how to get around in his motorized wheelchair, puffing and sucking into a tube with varying force to make the machine move in different directions. He also had to figure out how to poke at an iPad with a stick he holds in his mouth to use a computer. A lot of his and his family’s time was spent dealing with hospitals and insurance providers and caregivers.
In January, Arbaugh became the first person to receive a brain implant built by Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. as part of a clinical trial. The device won’t help Arbaugh move again, but it does offer the promise of helping him overcome some of his physical limitations by allowing him to control his laptop just by thinking the commands. He’s already been zipping around the web and communicating with friends using the implant instead of tapping at his iPad.
While other people have had similar devices implanted, Arbaugh has become the most public recipient. Part of this is because of the enormous attention that surrounds everything that Musk does. Arbaugh is sharing his story here for the first time. Obviously he isn’t happy about being paralyzed. But he says that it happened for a reason and that dedicating his body to science in this way is part of God’s plan for him.
Now 30, Arbaugh lives with his mother, stepdad, David Neely, and half-brother, Tavita, in Yuma, Arizona. They have a modest manufactured home just off a dirt road in a neighborhood surrounded by desert and scrub brush. Out back, the family has coops for chickens, roosters, quail and turkeys, as well as a large pen holding several Nigerian dwarf goats.
As a kid, Arbaugh played sports and joined his school band and chess team. He had a close-knit group of friends and found school easy—so easy, in fact, that he’d often skip class and simply show up for tests, which he usually aced. He then went off to Texas A&M, pursuing political science and international studies while taking part in the Corps of Cadets military program the school offered. A couple years in, Arbaugh began skipping class more often and spent most of his time bartending and hanging out with friends. “I eventually wanted to travel and be a nomad gypsy and do a whole lot of nothing,” he says.
Those plans, of course, all dissipated because of the accident. But Arbaugh, who comes off as an easygoing, smart young man, talks about his injury and the travails of his condition in a matter-of-fact, patient manner through a light, y’all-happy drawl that he must have acquired during his time in Texas. He has a mustache and small loop earnings in both lobes. Now and again, Arbaugh’s body will spasm, and he’ll ask Tavita, who’s 23, for help to stretch out his arm or leg after it’s been contorted into a tricky position, a ritual the pair has clearly performed many times.
Arbaugh still had his friends and family after the accident, but he spent a few years trying to find his place in the world. At times he felt helpless, like he was a burden. Although he applied for jobs, he couldn’t peck away at his iPad fast enough to meet the typing speed criteria. “It’s hard for me to do a lot,” he says. “I’ve tried other things, and I just can’t hack it.” He considered completing his college degree but couldn’t get his transcripts from the school because of outstanding student loans that he cannot pay. “I was sure that I was going to stay with my parents as long as they could have me, and then, at some point, I would be put in a home, and there’s nothing I could do about it,” Arbaugh says.
Then in September of last year, he got a call from his cadets roommate, Greg Bain. Bain had read that Neuralink was looking for the first patient to try out its brain implant. Arbaugh had never heard of Neuralink, so Bain walked him through the basic idea. The brain-computer interface implant had the potential to give paralyzed people a way of interacting with computers via their thoughts alone. “I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds pretty cool,’” Arbaugh says.
Bain helped Arbaugh fill out an online questionnaire about the nature of his injury, how much movement he was still capable of, if he smoked or drank or did drugs, if he had any other medical conditions and so on. Arbaugh had never been a heavy drinker or smoker, but he’d quit altogether about two years earlier, part of a regimen of self-improvement that also involved studying math and science and languages and listening to a steady stream of audiobooks. “I just decided that I wanted to start doing something with my life, and it made me feel productive,” he says.
Neuralink contacted Arbaugh the next day and soon began conducting phone interviews. Several weeks later the company asked him to show up at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for in-person tests that would, among other things, measure the thickness of his skull and the amount of space between his brain and skull. A veteran of medical bureaucracy and delays, Arbaugh took pleasure in seeing that an entire wing had been cleared to keep his arrival secret and that the tests were done in rapid-fire fashion by a team of doctors and nurses focused just on him. While no final decision had yet been made, some of the people at the hospital began hinting to Arbaugh that he was the lead candidate.
“It was awesome, because you could see how excited everyone was,” he says. “You could feel this energy. It was weird, because they kept telling me what an honor it was to meet me and how I was doing the greatest thing in the world. It was very surreal.” In January, Neuralink informed Arbaugh that he would indeed be the first person to receive the implant.
When you’re paralyzed from the neck down, the last vestige of normalcy that you have left comes from your brain. Arbaugh was allowing Neuralink direct, physical access to his, in a procedure that came with all the standard risks of serious surgery as well as the unknown risks of something so new. Doctors would be removing part of his skull and sticking Neuralink’s coin-size device with its electrode-laced threads—a foreign object that had never before been tested on humans—into his brain.
Arbaugh received the blessing of his mom and stepdad, who’d still be the ones caring for him if something went wrong. He also spent hours debating the merits of the procedure with Bain and other friends. One friend warned him that Musk has a “track record of being for progress above everything else,” Arbaugh says. “That he wants to make things happen and doesn’t care what happens along the way.” Another friend brought up the negative stories that have surrounded Neuralink’s implant tests on animals and argued that Arbaugh might suffer some type of horrible consequence as a result of the procedure.
Arbaugh, a Musk fan, pushed back. He questioned the credibility of the stories about the animals. He had also read a story about Musk’s behavior the night before SpaceX launched humans into space for the first time. Musk couldn’t sleep and prayed for the safety of the astronauts, despite not being a religious man. “That really put me at ease,” Arbaugh says. “It made me feel like he would not do this if he felt like it was going to end badly.”
Mostly, Arbaugh says, his faith pushed him ahead. He’s sure that God led him to quit smoking and drinking because that made him eligible for the trial, and he’s sure that God picked Barrow Neurological Institute as the place where the surgery would occur because it’s just a couple hours from his home, which made the whole thing feasible. “I wasn’t worried at all,” Arbaugh says. “I saw so many dots connecting for me that were fitting into this. My accident was such a freak accident, and I’d wondered why it had happened to me and what God had in store for me. When I started doing all the Neuralink stuff, I was like, ‘OK, well, this is it.’”
Arbaugh arrived at the hospital on Sunday, Jan. 28, at around 5 a.m. Musk had planned to meet him before the procedure, but he had issues with his private jet. The two men instead had a brief FaceTime chat, and Musk arrived at the hospital while the procedure was underway.
The surgery lasted less than two hours. As Arbaugh woke up, he saw his mother hovering over him. They locked eyes and held the stare for several beats, and Mia Neely asked if he was OK. “And he says, ‘Who are you? I don’t know who this is,’” Neely recalls. She broke into tears and was trying to get the attention of a doctor when she caught a smirk on Arbaugh’s face. He’d planned the gag ahead of time. “I wanted to let her know that everything was OK and to ease the tension,” Arbaugh says.
For about two decades, researchers have run experiments on humans with devices similar in concept to Neuralink’s, but they’ve been bulky and typically require a medical team to help operate them. As a result, the implants are almost always used in hospital and laboratory settings. Over the past few years, a handful of startups have developed more modern takes on these products and how to implant them. All of these companies want to use the implants to help people with debilitating conditions control machines in non-hospital settings.
The implants operate by gathering data as the brain’s neurons fire. With the help of artificial intelligence software, it’s possible to match specific patterns of neuronal activity with certain actions and translate that data into actions that take place on a computer. While Arbaugh can’t move his hands, for instance, he can think about moving his hands. The Neuralink implant can identify what that looks like, then transmit the intention to a nearby laptop or smartphone, allowing him to move a cursor around the screen. This means Arbaugh can play games, shop, choose audiobooks and generally interact with the online world much as anyone else can.
Most brain implant startups use technology that relies on placing electrodes near, but not quite right up against, someone’s neurons. One example is a device from Synchron that can nestle into a blood vessel in the brain through a relatively safe procedure that doesn’t require cutting into the skull. Precision Neuroscience has a product that sits on top of the brain’s surface. To get clearer signals, Neuralink slides electronic threads directly into the brain tissue, an approach that requires more invasive surgery. The primary objective of Arbaugh’s trial is to make sure that the procedure to place the implant is safe and that the device can stay in someone’s head for a long time without causing damage.
In addition to getting closer to the action, Neuralink’s device has many more electrodes than most of its rivals’ and much more data bandwidth. With the higher bandwidth, the implant can receive a richer signal from the brain, allowing someone like Arbaugh to navigate his computer faster and more effectively than he would with another product. If such technology works well, it could be a huge boon to people who suffer not just from paralysis but also from conditions such as ALS and strokes where their ability to move and communicate has been compromised.
In the first couple of weeks after returning home, Arbaugh had members of Neuralink’s team in his living room and kitchen to test the device. In research settings, brain implant patients usually need to rest after two to four hours because of mental and physical strain, but Arbaugh would go for up to 10 hours. The device also outperformed its predecessors. From Day 1, he began breaking speed records on the typical battery of tests used to benchmark the performance of brain-computer interface implants.
The world began to reopen for Arbaugh. He could play games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and chess with relative ease. He could hop between websites and audiobooks on his computer. And he could do all of this while lying in bed, which was far more comfortable and less spasm-inducing than sitting in his wheelchair and trying to get his mouth stick aligned just so with his iPad.
In the early days, Arbaugh had to learn how to tune Neuralink’s software to his brain patterns and get the gist of turning thoughts into action. As the weeks went by, the process became second nature. Arbaugh could carry on a conversation with someone while playing chess at the same time. It seemed like he’d developed a superpower.
But about a month into the practice sessions he found he had less precise control of the cursor on his screen and noticed a lag between his thoughts and the computing actions. These issues were the result of the electrode-laced threads in Arbaugh’s brain shifting around much more than Neuralink had seen during its animal trials. This disrupted the quality of the connections between his mind and his computer. His superpower began to fade.
The company has yet to disclose detailed information on what it believes caused the threads to move so much. One issue could be that the human brain is bigger than animal brains and sloshes around more. Arbaugh also has a thicker-than-average skull, which may have affected the way the threads settled into his tissue. Arbaugh will continue using the current version of the implant, but it’s likely that Neuralink will adjust its surgical procedures, and possibly parts of the implant itself, to address the problems as it heads toward testing the device on more patients this year.
Technology products almost always improve over time; Arbaugh had talked with Bain about how he would be receiving what was probably the worst Neuralink implant that anyone would get. But Arbaugh had agreed to the trial precisely because these types of issues could occur. He wanted to be a means for helping other people by aiding Neuralink in its quest to root out any of the implant’s flaws. Still, that didn’t make the loss of his newfound abilities any less painful.
“I started losing control of the cursor. I thought they’d made some changes and that was the reason," Arbaugh says. “But then they told me that the threads were getting pulled out of my brain. At first, they didn’t know how serious it would be or a ton about it.
“It was really hard to hear. I thought I’d gotten to use it for maybe a month, and then my journey was coming to an end. I thought they would just keep collecting some data but that they were really going to move on to the next person. I cried a little bit.”
Neuralink set to work trying to see what it could do to fix the issues. Its software engineers tweaked the algorithms that record data from Arbaugh’s neurons and made changes to the way that data gets analyzed and transferred to his computer. Arbaugh is now back to setting records. “I bet the next person that gets this is going to feel exactly the same way as I do,” he says. “Once you get a taste for using it, you just can’t stop. It blows my mind so much.”
Arbaugh taps into his implant 10 to 12 hours a day, only giving it a rest when it’s charging or when he’s sleeping. He begins each morning by reading an online devotional from the Gateway Church in Texas on his laptop and then assesses the state of his fantasy baseball roster. He’s still studying and churning through audiobooks and playing a lot of video games.
There is something magical about seeing Arbaugh in action. He used to perform a lot of his day-to-day tasks with a combination of voice commands and his mouth stick. If he had an audiobook playing, he couldn’t use speech-to-text functions to communicate unless he stopped the book, had some help with his mouth stick and hopped over to a new application. Now he goes from application to application with ease.
Neely, a youth pastor, sometimes can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’ll be streaming a show alongside Arbaugh in his bedroom while he’s playing a video game—with his mind. The biggest win for her, however, is that Arbaugh is happier and in less pain, because he can use his computer in whatever position is most comfortable for him. “We see the side of this where there’s not the hurting and the constant going in to adjust him and him shooting out his mouthpiece because he’s so frustrated,” she says. “It’s just so awesome. It’s a blessing.”
Arbaugh named his implant Eve in part, he says, because God presented Eve to Adam as his helper. Recently, he’s begun tracing letters on his computer screen with a cursor he controls through the implant. It’s the first stage of training Neuralink’s software to recognize the words that Arbaugh is thinking. The hope for Arbaugh is that he’ll soon be able to think entire sentences and have the software know what he’s trying to say. He’s long dreamed of being a fantasy writer and would like to write a novel.
Beyond that, Arbaugh isn’t totally sure what to do with his time in the limelight. He’d like to find a way to make a living from this experience, so he’s less dependent on his family and they won’t have to tend to him quite as much. “My brother has been caring for me for eight years,” Arbaugh says. “He needs to go live his life.” If fortune allowed it, he’d really like to make enough money to build his mom a house as a thank-you for everything she’s done for him.
Arbaugh has agreed to keep the device in his head and to provide data to Neuralink for a year. After that, he and the company will discuss whether he wants to have the device deactivated or even removed. Arbaugh suspects that he’ll want to keep it and even move on to the next version of the product when one is ready. “I’d want to upgrade,” he says. “Hopefully, they’ll put me on the short list.”
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