My first instinct was to just play around with it, moving my fingers around and seeing if I could notice any big spikes. Every time I moved my index finger, a big yellow spike appeared, and I did this three or four times. I just laid there and thought, “That’s so cool.” When you moved your finger, it jumped, and everyone in the room was fascinated.
Once they got me into the app and started getting me through things like calibration and body mapping and things like that, and getting the cursor control going for the first time, it was super intuitive. It wasn’t difficult at all, and I think it’s only going to get better from here.
Does body mapping mean that you think about moving your hands or fingers in a certain way and Neuralink associates that with certain neural signals?
Well, with body mapping, there was a visualization of hands moving on the screen. They asked me to do different movements, like pushing my hands forward and pulling my hands back, so I did that for a while. They said that we perform actions during body mapping, but the same actions become how we control the cursor. We performed finger presses, pressing 10 times with each finger. And they said, “OK, this finger received the best signal, so we’re going to use it to click.” So I was using that finger every time I clicked. It was very intuitive.
Are you not actually moving your fingers, just thinking?
Exactly. Even though I can’t move it, I can try to move it, and it feels like I have to move it. Those signals are still happening in my brain.
How does it feel to use the device? Do you really have to concentrate?
No, it’s very easy. I’m always multitasking when I’m in a session or playing. Put on an audiobook or put something on the TV and play a game at the same time. It requires very little brain power. All I keep thinking about is where I want the cursor to go.
What devices can I use the Neuralink app on?
It’s currently only available on Macbooks, but it’s coming to other devices. We plan to move to phone calls soon and continue from there.
Neuralink I recently published a blog post For the first 100 days of using the device, it said, some of the threads of the implant, dotted with electrodes that read neural activity, were pulled out of the brain. Did you notice any differences in functionality?
I knew right away that something was wrong. I started losing control of my cursor. I think it was about three weeks ago. I thought it was on their end, like they had changed something that made the software perform worse.
