Man with mind-reading Neuralink chip says Elon ‘changed his life’

Noland Arbaugh has a chip in his head that lets him move a computer cursor with just his brain. No hands. No voice. Just thoughts. He was paralyzed in a diving accident in 2016.

Now he’s playing video games again. The chip is from Neuralink, the company owned by Elon Musk. Arbaugh says Musk changed his life, but not because of who he is. The change came from what the chip does.

In January 2024, eight years after the accident, Arbaugh became the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant. He was 30 years old. The chip isn’t the first of its kind. Other companies already made similar implants. But none got this much attention. Not because of the science. Because of Musk.

Noland takes the risk for the science

Arbaugh told BBC he knew the risks when he signed up. “Good or bad, whatever may be, I would be helping,” he said. “If something terrible happened, I knew they would learn from it.” He didn’t care about fame or headlines. He cared about the tech. He wanted to push it forward.

He was clear: the real story isn’t him, and it’s not Musk. “If everything worked out, then I could help being a participant of Neuralink,” he said. His goal was simple. Help move the science forward. He knew he was taking a chance. The surgery is invasive. The chip goes into your skull. It taps into the motor region of the brain. It detects neuron spikes when you try to move, and turns them into computer commands.

Arbaugh had no movement below the shoulders. Before the chip, he relied on others for everything. “You just have no control, no privacy, and it’s hard,” he said. “You have to learn that you have to rely on other people for everything.” He thought he’d never be able to study or game again. That changed with the implant.

He moves the cursor by thinking about fingers

After the surgery, Arbaugh said he woke up and was already able to move a cursor on a screen. Not with a joystick. Not with eye-tracking. Just his brain. He imagined wiggling his fingers. The chip picked it up. It translated it into motion. His cursor moved.

He said, “Honestly I didn’t know what to expect — it sounds so sci-fi.” Then he saw his neuron spikes flash on a screen in real time. “It all sort of sunk in,” he said. “I could control my computer with just my thoughts.” Around him, the Neuralink engineers were buzzing. But he was calm. It worked. The signals were real. It was his brain doing it.

Over time, his control got better. Now he’s able to play chess and video games again. “I grew up playing games,” he said. That was gone after the accident. “Now I’m beating my friends at games, which really shouldn’t be possible but it is.” He didn’t sugarcoat it. This wasn’t a miracle. This was a system. Electrodes, spikes, code, movement.

Musk kept it quiet in public. He only posted, “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” But Arbaugh says Musk was much more hyped in private. “I think he was just as excited as I was to get started,” he said. The two talked before and after surgery. But Arbaugh made it clear — he doesn’t think of the implant as “an Elon Musk device.”

Still, Musk’s name has pulled in massive attention. It’s also pulled in a lot of funding. But it’s not all love. Critics have slammed the company for skipping steps and overpromising. Others warned about the risks of brain privacy and data leaks.

Experts warn about privacy and long-term risk

Anil Seth, a neuroscience professor at the University of Sussex, said the biggest red flag is privacy. “So if we are exporting our brain activity… then we are kind of allowing access to not just what we do but potentially what we think, what we believe and what we feel.” He said, “Once you’ve got access to stuff inside your head, there really is no other barrier to personal privacy left.”

That doesn’t bother Arbaugh. He wants the chip to go even further. He told BBC he hopes to one day control a wheelchair, or even a robot. But the chip isn’t perfect. At one point, he completely lost control of his computer. The device got partially disconnected from his brain. He said, “That was really upsetting to say the least.” For a moment, he thought the journey was over. “I didn’t know if I would be able to use Neuralink ever again.”

The connection was fixed. Engineers rewrote some code. Now the device is even more stable. But that breakdown raised a bigger concern. What happens when the chip fails? What’s the backup plan when the brain-to-computer pipeline breaks?

Arbaugh agreed to join a six-year study. What happens after that? No one knows. There’s no clear path after the trial ends. His entire brain-device connection is technically temporary. He’s aware of that. But he’s not focused on the end. “We know so little about the brain,” he said. “And this is allowing us to learn so much more.”

Other companies push the brain-computer race

Neuralink isn’t alone. A company called Synchron also makes brain chips, but their method is less invasive. Instead of opening the skull, Synchron runs a device called Stentrode through the jugular vein. It rides through the blood vessels and ends up near the motor cortex. It reads the same electrical signals. But no skull cutting. No implants in the brain tissue.

Synchron’s chief technology officer, Riki Bannerjee, explained how their chip works. “It picks up when someone is thinking of tapping or not tapping their finger,” she said. “By being able to pick up those differences it can create what we call a digital motor output.” The system has been tested on ten people.

One of them, named Mark, told BBC he used it with Apple’s Vision Pro headset. He said he’s visited waterfalls in Australia and walked digital mountains in New Zealand. All while sitting still. He didn’t want his full name used. But he said, “I can see down the road in the future a world where this technology could really, really make a difference for someone that has this or any paralysis.”

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