Neuralink, the neuroscience research company founded by Elon Musk, has released a video that for the first time shows a human patient who received his brain chip playing a video game with his mind, The Guardian and The Economic Times reported.

Noland Arbo, 29, paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident, received a brain implant designed by Neuralink in January this year.

A video released by the company on Thursday shows him playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using a Neuralink implant without touching a mouse or any other external device.

“The surgery was extremely easy,” Arbo said of implanting the device, making the comment during a video streamed live on X, the former Twitter social network that Musk acquired in October 2022.

“I was discharged from the hospital a day later. I don’t have any cognitive problems,” said the man. He also says that the Neuralink device allowed him to play the much more difficult video game Civilization VI.

“I actually gave up on this game. All of you [de la Neuralink] you gave me this ability and I played it for 8 hours straight,” he explained.

But Kip Ludwig, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, points out that the video released by Neuralink doesn’t show anything that wasn’t possible before.

“It is still very early post-implantation and there is much to learn for both Neuralink and the patient to maximize the amount of information they can control,” he added.

In late January, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink had made its first brain implant

Neuralink says it is testing its brain implant on “people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.”

Musk reposted Arbo’s video on his X page, saying it demonstrated “telepathy — controlling a computer and playing video games just by thinking.”

On Jan. 30, the South African billionaire announced that Neuralink had performed its first brain implant on a patient two days earlier, an operation that other companies and researchers have performed several times, Kip Ludwig recalls.

“First results show promising neural activity,” Elon Musk wrote on X at the time.

In September, the Dutch company Onward announced that it is testing the connection of a brain implant with another that stimulates the spinal cord to allow a quadriplegic patient to regain mobility.

Back in 2019, researchers from Grenoble’s Clinatec Institute presented an implant that, once installed, allows a person with body paralysis to animate their exoskeleton and move their arms or walk.

Last year, Neuralink received FDA approval to test its brain chip on humans

Last May, Neuralink announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given the green light to its first human clinical trials.

FDA approval “represents an important first step that will allow our technology to one day help many people,” the company said at the time.

In late 2022, Musk made headlines when he said he was so confident in the safety of Neuralink implants that he would be willing to implant them in his own children. At the time, he estimated that Neuralink would connect a human brain to a computer within six months.

Musk has predicted that Neuralink will begin human trials at least four times starting in 2019, but his company did not seek FDA approval until early 2022. The agency rejected the initial request, according to statements several Neuralink employees told Reuters in March 2023.

The FDA outlined several issues that Neuralink was required to address before approval for human trials, they said.

The main concerns related to the lithium battery of the device, the possibility of migration of the implant wires into the brain, and the ability to safely remove the device without damaging the brain tissue.