Paralysed from the shoulders down, 30-year-old Noland Arbaugh relies on technology to make his life easier.
He has a power wheelchair, which he controls by blowing or sucking through a straw. His remote-controlled mattress will sit him up and keep ripples of air circulating at all times to prevent pressure sores building up.
A motorised lift gets him out of bed, while voice-controlled technology around the room helps him control lighting, his fan, TV and sound bar.
The brain chip is around the size of a 10p coin
Arbaugh also has something else: a coin-size device laced with hair-thin tentacles implanted in his brain.
This chip allows him to operate his phone and computer through thoughts alone. It might be able to do more – for example, he is currently training it to recognise his handwriting just by imagining writing the letters. (One day, he hopes to write a novel this way.)
Arbaugh was the first person to receive the implant from Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink. The young American quadriplegic is confident that, in the future, this kind of technology will cure paralysis, bypassing the broken link in the spinal cord to talk directly to the body.
Late last year, when Arbaugh was offered the opportunity to become Neuralink’s ‘guinea pig’, there was every reason to demur. ‘It’s my brain and that’s the last thing I have,’ he tells me over a Teams interview.
Arbaugh, who lives in the desert town of Yuma, Arizona, dislocated two vertebrae in a freak accident when he was 22. It happened at a summer camp where he was working as a counsellor. He’d run into a lake with a bunch of friends and, somehow, hit his head – at just the angle, and with just enough force, to dislocate his neck for a split second.
A still from the first social media clip released by Musk, of Arbaugh playing chess ‘telepathically’
The accident divided his life into ‘before’ and ‘after’. ‘It put me on a very different trajectory,’ he says. ‘Before, I travelled, studied abroad and was planning to do more travel. I was very active. I’d played sports my entire life – soccer, American football, basketball, golf, ultimate Frisbee; I did track and I spent a semester in Australia, where I played rugby. To go from that to sitting on the sidelines watching other people play sports when I used to be in the middle of it was really hard.’
For five years, Arbaugh struggled to find his way. ‘I was just trying to fill my days and find some way to cope,’ he says. At first he continued to live with the friend he’d shared with before the accident, but it got too hard for everyone to manage, so he moved back to his family home, where he is supported by his mum, stepfather and half-brother.
‘I watched a lot of TV and stared at my walls constantly, thinking about life, what I’d done wrong, what I could have done better.’
The chip, called Telepathy, has tiny thread-like sensors
He also smoked a lot of marijuana. ‘It was partly for the pain, partly as an escape, but that was hard because people had to help me do it. I didn’t mind destroying my own body, but I was harming someone else with second-hand smoke. Getting through was a long process.’
He did get through, though. Arbaugh quit the smoking and embarked on a programme of self-improvement, studying maths, science and languages – he’s learning French and Japanese – listening also to audiobooks. He got better and better at chess. Two years into this regime, he was called by his friend, who told him Neuralink was looking for a candidate to be the first human recipient of a device called Telepathy. ‘Do you want to get a chip in your brain?’ joked his friend. ‘Sure, why not?’ was Arbaugh’s response.
The application involved many stages, including phone interviews, then in-person tests at the Barrow Neurological Unit in Phoenix, Arizona. ‘At first, I didn’t think much about the pros and cons,’ he says. (The chosen candidate wouldn’t be paid by Neuralink to participate, but the company did cover costs for things like travel.)
Musk at a start-up and innovation conference in Paris last yer
When Arbaugh was selected, plenty gave him pause for thought. He was to be the first person to have a Neuralink chip implanted in his brain.
(This summer a second, anonymous, person underwent the procedure and has had a successful reaction to it so far.) ‘I thank god every day since my accident that I was left with the same personality and ability to communicate and think,’ he says. ‘In the hospital where I was treated, there was one floor for spinal-cord injuries and another for traumatic brain injuries, so I got to see first hand what that’s like. It changes you. You’re not the same person. Letting someone go in and do brain surgery on me was reliving that risk when my brain was all I had.’
Many people warned him against anything run by Elon Musk. It’s not known exactly how much money the billionaire businessman has poured into Neuralink, but in July 2019 it was reported that he gave £100 million in just one round of funding.
‘A lot of my friends don’t like [Musk],’ says Arbaugh. ‘They don’t think he does things with the best intentions, but that he’s for progress above all else – he’ll do whatever he needs, despite risk.’
Arbaugh had a different take. ‘You have one of the richest, most powerful men on the planet doing something that directly affects and helps people like me. It’s something I never would have expected, and it gives me hope.’
Ultimately, Arbaugh decided to go ahead.
‘I knew that being part of something like this would give me a huge sense of purpose. I was looking forward to giving everything I could to it. Being the first is monumental.’
The surgery took place in late January this year. Strangely, Arbaugh wasn’t nervous. ‘I thought that, for sure, I’d start to freak out about it at some point, even right before surgery, but I never did,’ he says. ‘I was just excited and never expected anything to go wrong.’
He even managed to play a cruel trick on his mother when he awoke afterwards, looking at her and asking who she was.
‘I only let that joke last a few seconds because she started crying,’ he says. ‘She was not happy about it! I wanted her to see that I was the same!’ Arbaugh also met Musk after the operation. ‘I was pretty drugged up, but I’ve met him since and he’s cool and down to earth – though I don’t know if you can say that about someone who is trying to get people to Mars!’
When a person thinks about moving any part of their body, certain neurons in their brain will fire in accordance – even if that person is paralysed. The Neuralink chip works by monitoring those firing neurons (or ‘thought waves’) and recording the data. So scientists might tell Arbaugh to think about how he would type on his phone, for instance, the letter T. He would do it and the chip would recognise that the specific thought-wave meant he wanted to type a T. The result: when Arbaugh next wanted to type T, the chip would understand the thought wave, communicating the information to his computer, and the letter would appear on his screen.
Arbaugh saw positive results within ten days. If he simply thought about texting, playing chess or switching from one computer game to another, it happened.
‘It made a profound impact on my ability to communicate with the world,’ he says. ‘Sending a text message used to take forever – words wouldn’t be picked up. I’d be shouting at Siri. Imagine staying in touch with ten or 15 friends or having an actual exchange. It took too long, and I was not a good friend. Now I can do it in seconds. Everything is super-simple. I’m also on social media, which I’d never been before as it was just too hard. And I’m live-streaming my computer games.’
There was a glitch about a month after the operation, when the thread-like sensors on the chip shifted in his brain, disrupting the connections. Within two days Arbaugh had lost control of the cursor. ‘That was really rough – to have got that far and hit that high then have it all taken away,’ he says. ‘Ultimately, I realised that all the work we were doing was going to help, no matter what, so a few days later, I perked back up and we got back to work.’
The Neuralink team shifted the way they gathered data – having lost the loudest signals, they instead responded to a larger cluster of neuron signals, both loud and quiet, and the algorithm responded well.
‘We had to do things differently and it took a while, but we’ve been able to get back pretty much the same control, which is incredibly impressive,’ says Arbaugh. ‘It feels like the threads have stabilised again.’
This is a full-time commitment. Every weekday, Arbaugh spends four hours working remotely with the Neuralink team to calibrate and recalibrate, to map his thoughts and discover what more the technology can do. This is a six-year study, and Arbaugh doesn’t know what will come after that. ‘I might like to do speaking engagements or work for Neuralink as a consultant. I don’t know what the possibilities are,’ he says. ‘I’ve been surprised by how much it’s been able to learn in just a few months. Sometimes it knows my intention – it knows what I want to do before I do, which is scary.’
Does he worry about the possibilities of mind-reading devices in the wrong hands? ‘There are people a lot smarter than I am to think about what’s ethical or safe,’ he says. ‘My main goal is helping people with disabilities – paralysed people and people with motor function diseases. In my mind, this is more than capable of curing paralysis – the idea is to put a chip in the brain and another one below the level of injury, so that they talk directly to each other. Optimistically, I believe that will happen in ten or 20 years.’
So one day he could be back playing soccer and American football? Arbaugh laughs. ‘I don’t know if I’d play high-contact sports again! But yes – even if it doesn’t happen for me, I know it will happen at some point and the work I’m doing is part of that. If it means there are people who won’t have to live with what I’ve had to, that’s good enough for me.’
