Think Neuralink: Elon Musk hails first-ever X post 'made just by thinking'

Noland Arbaugh, aged 29, paralysed below the shoulder due to a diving accident, made history by posting a tweet on X (formerly Twitter) 'just by thinking'.

Last Wednesday, Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-chip startup, livestreamed its first successful demonstration of a patient using a chip implanted in his brain to play online chess using only his mind.

The patient, Noland Arbaugh, aged 29, had been paralysed below the shoulder due to a diving accident. He controlled the cursor on his laptop by using the Neuralink device.

Today, Arbaugh made history by posting a tweet on X (formerly Twitter) "just by thinking".

"Twitter banned me because they thought I was a bot, @X and @elonmusk reinstated me because I am," Arbaugh joked.

Elon Musk also shared Arbaugh's tweet, celebrating it as the "First ever post made just by thinking, using the Neuralink Telepathy device!"

Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments."

"I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "You all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues."

"I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a "breakthrough."

"It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject's side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved," he added.

Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient that they have been able to interface with a computer in a way they were not able to before the implant. "It's certainly a good starting point," he said.

Last month, Reuters reported that the US Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk's Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in humans. Neuralink did not respond then to questions about the FDA's inspection.

(With Reuters inputs)