The Journal. - The First Person to Get Elon Musk’s Neuralink Brain Chip

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is on a mission to enable humans to communicate with computers using their thoughts. Now they have successfully implanted their device in a human.. WSJ's Rolfe Winkler explores the new technology and speaks to Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink's first participant. Further Reading: - Elon Musk’s Neuralink Shows First Patient Using Its Brain Implant  - Elon Musk’s Neuralink Gets FDA Green Light for Second Patient, as First Describes His Emotional Journey  Further Listening: - Elon Musk's 'Demon Mode'  - Elon Musk on 2024 Politics, Succession Plans and Whether AI Will Annihilate Humanity   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, this is Nolan. Hi, Nolan. It's Rolf Winkler from the Wall Street Journal. How are you? Hi, Rolf. How are you doing, man? I'm good. I'm great. Last week, our colleague Rolf Winkler spoke to Nolan Arbaugh. Eight years ago, Nolan had a serious accident in a lake. He describes he was running into the water with some friends. He recalls sort of jumping into the water,

and then the next thing he knew, he was not moving. And he thought for a second he was going to drown. And he almost did drown. Then he was pulled out of the water. Noland had suffered a severe spinal cord injury and it left him with, you know, very little, basically no function below his shoulders. Since the accident, Noland, who's 30,

has been living with his parents and has had to rely on them for just about everything. For eating, for getting in bed, for all kinds of things, going to the bathroom. You're basically highly dependent on caregivers, and it's very difficult in that position to live an independent life, which is something that he dreams about, right? It's something we all take for granted.

But a few months ago, a technological innovation changed Nolan's life. He was the first person to have a chip implanted into his brain by Neuralink, a company launched by Elon Musk in 2016. The chip allows Nolan to control a computer cursor with his thoughts. What's something that, you know, one or two things you couldn't do before that you can do now i kept myself a lot before um it was hard for me to interact with my friends some of my family just the world in general and the neural linkink has changed all of that. I've been able to keep conversations with my friends and then interacting with my computer all sorts of stuff

being able to surf the web and it helps me learn languages like from my bed lying down I'm able to play video games just really anything that you know young know, young people do, older people do on their computer, I'm able to do. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, May 24th. Coming up on the show, the first human implanted with one of Neuralink's brain chips. With Uber Reserve, you can book your Uber ride in advance.

90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. Elon Musk likes starting companies with big ambitions, like Tesla, which has been a pioneer of electric vehicles, and SpaceX, which is trying to get humans to Mars. What are Elon Musk's ambitions with Neuralink? What he said is he thinks artificial intelligence is going to advance rapidly, and he wants to help humanity go along for the ride.

Like, we will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer. So therefore, if you cannot beat him, join him. Musk has said that the way we interact with computers today by typing or using our voice is much slower than if we could do it with our thoughts. You know, if I wanted to simplify it, I think Elon is so busy and he's probably texting and sending tweets on X all the time

and doing all these things on his phone. And he's limited by how fast his thumbs can type. Boy, we are just an impatient species if typing is too slow. Typing is too slow, so let's make ourselves more productive so we can think to our device and do things more quickly. I think that's, in a way, one of the ultimate goals here. Now, what's interesting is this technology has been around for, you know, 20 years or so. But existing computer-to-brain interface technology is clunky. It requires giant equipment that means patients can only use it in a lab or clinical setting.

Neuralink wanted to create a chip that was so small that it could be concealed inside your skull, and people could easily wear it in their daily lives. The idea for Neuralink was, how can we update this with modern electronics, in a sense, so that we can make it wireless inside your brain? And maybe we can add a whole bunch more electrodes to the device, snaking into your brain so they can read more of your neural signals and then maybe pull more information out of your brain. But Neuralink couldn't just start putting its wireless chips into people's brains. First, the company had to get the green light from government regulators,

like the Food and Drug Administration. To do that, Neuralink gave a medical justification for why the device should exist. It could help people who've lost the use of their limbs. That's their first order of business is how can we use this technology to help people with, for instance, quadriplegia regain some function. There's a tremendous amount of good that Neuralink can do in solving critical damage to the brain or the spinal cord. There's a lot that can be done to improve quality of life of individuals. Neuralink spent years testing its technology on animals like pigs and monkeys. And what the company eventually developed was a chip called the N1.

It's about the size of a quarter and looks kind of like a watch battery. There are 64 tiny wires that snake out of it, all thinner than a human hair, and all with 16 electrodes individually, tiny microscopic electrodes. You take those little tiny threads and you insert them into the motor cortex. The motor cortex is right on top of the brain, sort of in the middle of the head. How they get it into the brain is also fascinating because Neuralink not only invented the chip to do this, they also invented a robot to implant the thing. You know, you carve a little hole out of your skull, and then this sewing machine with a lot of computer optics

is looking at your brain, and it's trying to identify various spots where it wants to insert these threads about three to five millimeters down into your motor cortex. Then in a flash, in an instant, you know, boom, it just drops down in the blink of an eye

and inserts that tiny thread just a few millimeters into your brain, into the gray matter. And it does that 64 times and then they put the chip in your skull and seal it up. 64 times, and then they put the chip in your skull and seal it up. In May 2023, the FDA gave approval for Neuralink to begin its first clinical study with humans. About a thousand people signed up to try it out.

And Nolan Darbaugh, who you heard from at the start of this episode, was chosen to go first. I never was afraid going into any of this. I felt completely at ease with what was going on around me as far as getting into the study and surgery. All I knew was that I was here for a

reason, and whether or not things went good or bad, that it would help people in the future. And I was happy with that. After Nolan's chip was implanted into his brain, there was some good and also some bad. That's next. Imagine you're in Ottawa paddling along the Rideau Canal.

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Buy a stick in store at Costco, Walmart, Amazon, and other Canadian retailers. Amazon, and other Canadian retailers. Noland had his chip implantation surgery in January, and he was sent home from the hospital the next day. Soon, he was controlling a computer just by thinking. Hey, everyone. My name's Noland. As you all probably know, I'm the first Neuralink patient.

Here he is on a live stream on X, showing off what the chip can do. This is Eve, my implant, which I named. The device allows Nolan to effortlessly move a computer cursor around a screen and play games like Snake. It's something I do because it lets me, it kind of gives me an idea of how good the model is. If I can do certain things, if I can make sharp turns, if I can avoid people in this game, then I know that my cursor control is actually pretty good. In their interview last week, Noland told Rolf that he had to train the chip to read the signals in his brain. It decodes your neural signals in order to turn them into move mouse left, move it right, click, up, down.

It's basically just me thinking it to do those things. I never forgot how to do any of those things, I guess, like physically. Just because I can't do it doesn't mean I don't know how. It's just that there's a disconnect in my spinal cord where I heard it, right, dislocated it, where the signal just doesn't get through. And so that's why, like, none of my body moves. At first, it was almost all attentive movement because that's what was natural to me. I knew what it felt like to, like, move a cursor to the left or right with my hand. I knew what it felt like to click down with my index finger.

So that's what I was doing. And then at some point, maybe two weeks in, I could just think, you know, click, or I could think, move, and it would give me the same desired effect, which really blew my mind when that first happened. Noland and Neuralink were excited by these results. But then, Noland experienced a setback. The surgery happened in late January. And fast forward to the end of February, and Noland started to notice that his ability to move the cursor of February. And Nolan started to notice that his ability

to move the cursor was declining. The performance of the device was kind of rapidly falling. He just couldn't control it anymore, right? I'm thinking left, I'm thinking right, I'm thinking click, and it's not responding to me the way it was. In early March,

Neuralink told Nolan that some of the threads in his brain had come loose. At that moment, you know, it was very hard for him. He's been given this awesome capability and now it's taken away from him, right? Can you imagine? He said he told me he cried when he thought about that. It sucked. It was really hard. I had just barely been able to start doing this, and I had seen how much fun it was and how awesome it could be, and that, I thought, was all about to be taken away.

I thought it was all just going to end for me right then. So what happened next? Did Neuralink try to fix it? They did. And they did. He still had some of those threads in there. And so they still were reading some neural signals. And they were able to interpret the remaining neural signals

and kind of tweak the algorithms so that in effect he was able to regain basically all of the abilities he lost things have been getting progressively better to the point where a few weeks ago i even surpassed my previous record um like with performance that was going on before the thread started really retracting. And so that's amazing. It makes me very, very hopeful for the future of this. It seems like we've learned a lot, and it seems like things are going in the right direction. This week, the FDA gave Neuralink the go-ahead to insert a chip into a second participant. This time, Neuralink plans to insert the threads deeper into the brain to ensure they don't come loose.

The company hopes to have inserted chips into 10 people by the end of the year. You know, ultimately, there's a whole bunch of things they'd like to do with this device. You know, they want to maybe one day help restore something approximating sight to the blind. They'd like to, you know, theoretically implant more than one neural link, one in the brain and maybe one in the spinal column so that they can talk to each other and restore actual movement.

So these are things that are on the roadmap that they're thinking about. I think, you know, they don't know exactly what they can accomplish, but they have big goals. How far away do you think we are from this futuristic world where we're all sort of like cyborg humans who have these chips in our heads and can mind meld with computers? Well, you know, as far as Elon's ultimate goal, which is elective surgery for healthy humans,

to just, you know, we would just go to a Neuralink surgery center and get one of these devices. And then, you know, three years later when a new one is available, we'd get the first one extracted and get the new one. How far are we away from that kind of future? I think still pretty far away. But, you know, in the meantime, there are, you know, some millions of people worldwide that live with spinal cord injuries, many of whom could potentially benefit from a device like this.

And so that's the goal for now. And they've certainly got a lot on their plate, just helping those folks. The idea of helping someone who is quadriplegic control a computer with their mind or like help a blind person see again that all sounds amazing but then to think about where this technology could lead to this world where human beings walk around with computer chips in their brain so they can like post to instagram faster with their thoughts Like one vision of the future seems so optimistic and hopeful, and the other seems in some ways sort of dark and a little scary. And, you know, completely dystopian. I mean, sure, any kind of brain computer interface technology, you know, it reads input from your brain, but it can also send signals to your brain.

What are the implications? This is farther away, but what does it mean for technology to be sending signals directly in? It's one thing. I can turn off my phone. There's a lot of ways in which my cell phone, my smartphone, social media, whatever, do bad things for my brain. But if I really want to,

I can put it down and put it in a corner and not use it for a weekend and go on a digital detox or something. What's that going to look like when the technology is actually inside my skull? What are Nolan's ambitions with this technology? I think he wants to keep moving forward to as much of an independent life as he can manage. And he'd like to be able to have a measure of independence that the rest of us all take for granted. And, you know, using a computer

is just one part of independent existence, of course. But, you know, in the modern age, when that's how we communicate with the outside world, it's a big part of independence. So it's, you know, it's a step towards that for him. I know that there are a lot of things that Neuralink is hoping to accomplish with this as far as, like, being able to interact with different things.

I've always had a dream of being able to you know use this to connect to all the devices across basically my whole like life like you know it could connect to a Tesla and allow me to get in the Tesla and you know direct that and drive it I don't know it's hard for me to say what all the possibilities are because I just think that at this point, they're endless. There's so much to look forward to with this technology and so much to be excited for for the future. That's all for today.

Friday, May 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by... Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Marcus Begala, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapak, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Special thanks to T. Cruz, Nick Johnson, and Gerard Cole for their work on our video episode with Paris Hilton and Carter Ream. And this is Annie Baxter's last week on the show. Annie, it has been so great working

with you. Thank you for always being an advocate for my stupid dad jokes. We're going to miss you so much. Thanks for listening. See you Tuesday.