Neuralink’s First User Is ‘Constantly Multitasking’ With His Brain Implant

The second thing that gave me pause was that I didn’t know if I wanted to be the first one to get this in my brain if anything would go wrong with the implant. What if it breaks or stops working and I only have it for a day, a week? I thought maybe someone else should get it first, and I’ll get the better version of it.

Did Neuralink prepare you for the possibility that the implant might not work?

I knew there were a lot of risks going in, and I knew it might not work. I didn’t anticipate any of that though. I had complete faith in Neuralink.

The day after your surgery, Musk posted on X that the device was showing neuron spike detection. Was it really that fast?

I was lying in my hospital bed right after surgery, and they came in and woke up the implant for the first time. They showed me a screen with different channels on it, and they said they were real-time signals that the Neuralink was picking up in my brain. So I knew it was working.

My first instinct was to just start playing around, moving my fingers, to see if I could notice any big spikes. Every time I moved my index finger, there was a big yellow spike, and I did it three or four times. I was just lying there thinking, “That’s so cool.” I moved my finger and it jumped, and everyone in the room was just geeking out.

Once they started putting me in the app and letting me do things like calibration and body mapping and I got cursor control for the first time, it was very intuitive. It wasn’t hard at all, and I think it’s only going to improve from here.

By body mapping, you mean that you would think about moving your hand or your finger in a certain way and Neuralink would correlate that with a certain neural signal?

Yeah, so in the body mapping, there were visualizations of a hand moving on a screen. There were different actions that they had me perform, like push your hand forward, pull your hand back, and so I did that for a while. We would do the action during body mapping, and they said that same action will be how you control the cursor. We did finger presses, like pushing down with each of my fingers 10 times. Then they would say, “OK, this finger got the best signal, and so that’s the one we’re going to use for the click.” So every time I went to click, I used that finger. It was very intuitive.

You’re not actually moving your finger then, just thinking about it?

Exactly. Even though I can’t move it, I can still try to move it, and it feels like it should be moving. The signal is still happening in my brain.

What does it feel like to be using the device? Do you have to concentrate really hard?