[imagesource: YouTube / Neuralink]

Nothing to see here, folks, just a monkey playing a video game using only its mind.

That’s what Elon Musk and his company, Neuralink, are claiming, releasing a YouTube video simply titled ‘Monkey MindPong’.

The monkey in question is Pager, a nine-year-old macaque monkey that the video’s narrator says had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks before the video was shot.

Neuralink and Elon have in the past spoken about ‘hacking’ the human brain, and Elon has quipped about having a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull who can play video games using his mind, but this is the first footage we have seen.

Before we watch that footage, here’s The Verge:

[Pager] was first taught to play video games with a joystick for a banana smoothie reward, delivered through a metal straw. While he was doing this, the Neuralink device recorded information about which neurons were firing — learning, essentially, to predict hand movements by recording which regions fired.

After learning the patterns, the joystick Pager used to play was disconnected from the computer. The monkey appears to go on playing the game using only his mind — playing a game of Pong with no joystick whatsoever.

Take it away, Pager:

There’s also this, which comes with the description “Extended MindPong with neural activity overlay”:

Elon was clearly stoked when he tweeted out the footage:

A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021

So Bill Gates is accused of using the COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips into our brain, but Elon pops an implant into a monkey’s brain and that’s all good?

I digress.

Neuralink’s claims are being met with some scepticism, as the video isn’t accompanied by peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals, which could be checked by other scientists.

Still, it’s plausible, given what we have seen elsewhere:

 It’s believable that a monkey might play video games using a brain implant — after all, a paralyzed man has already used a robotic arm and a non-Neuralink brain implant to drink beer.

Following the video drop, Elon returned to his other hobby, tweeting memes:

pic.twitter.com/XeQursZpvq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021

[source:verge]