In 2016, Noland Arbaugh suffered a spinal cord injury while swimming in a lake. The details are fuzzy, but what he remembers is rushing toward the water with his friends, diving in, and hitting his head on something—or someone. He floated to the surface, unable to move.
Doctors later confirmed that he was paralyzed from the neck down. Arbaugh went from being a self-sufficient college student to moving back in with his parents and relying on them for his daily needs. He learned how to get around in a wheelchair and use a mouth-held stick to operate an iPad, but the hardest adjustment was feeling like he was a burden on his family.
The year 2016 was also when Elon Musk cofounded the brain implant startup Neuralink. This January, Arbaugh became the first person to receive the company’s investigational device, dubbed Telepathy, as part of a clinical trial. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it decodes intended movement signals in the brain and translates them into computer commands. Arbaugh just has to think about moving a cursor on his laptop screen and it moves.
The experimental device has given Arbaugh, now 30, a sense of independence. Before, using a mouth-stick required someone to position him upright. If he dropped his mouth-stick, it needed to be picked up for him. And he couldn’t use it for long or he’d develop sores. With the Neuralink device, he has nearly full control of a computer. He can browse the web and play computer games whenever he wants, and Neuralink says he has set the human record for cursor control with a BCI.
Arbaugh isn’t the first person to get a BCI; one recipient, Nathan Copeland, has had one for nine years. Beyond Neuralink, several other companies are working to commercialize BCIs to help people with paralysis, mental health disorders, and even blindness. Arbaugh recently spoke with WIRED via Zoom to talk about his experience in the Neuralink study. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Emily Mullin: Before you got the implant, what was your day-to-day life like?
Noland Arbaugh: I was lying in bed most days, all day. I didn’t get up a whole lot unless I had something to do. I got up to take showers every other day. I got up when people would come to my house to see me, but outside of that I was just in bed.
Right before my “initiation” into Neuralink, I was trying to learn a lot more. I was trying to get my life back on track, because I had kind of done nothing for five years after my accident. So I started learning languages and stuff. The two years before the Neuralink trial I was actively trying to better myself.
You’ve said you found out about the Neuralink trial from a friend. Had you heard of brain-computer interfaces before then?
No, never.
Musk is a very showy person, and Neuralink has livestreamed some flashy updates over the years. What was your initial impression of the company?
I was blown away at what they were trying to do. You know, Elon Musk, he has had such an impact on the world, whether people think that’s good or bad. It was really cool knowing that he was a part of something like this. I really feel like we’re kindred spirits with our mentality of wanting to better humanity.
It was very cool to see the richest man in the world, possibly one of the most powerful men in the world, taking an interest—you just don’t see this kind of funding go into things for handicapped people.
You had to go through a pretty extensive screening process to find out if you were eligible for the Neuralink trial. What was that like?
It took about a month. I applied and within a day I’d gotten an email back that said I’d been selected and they wanted me to go through the first interview. I did a bunch of Zoom interviews. I had to do a lot of medical screenings. They asked about my medical history and family history, and I had to do a psych screening.
At the very end, about a month in, I went to the hospital they had selected. I did a full day of screening, which was eight hours of tests, including brain scans, different head scans, blood tests, and urine tests. I did another psychoanalysis and then memory tests to see if I was all there cognitively and also just to get a baseline, so if anything changes they would be able to know where I was when I began. That was a long day.
After that, it was just a waiting game.
When they told you that you had been selected for the trial and were going to get the Neuralink implant, how did you feel?
The whole time I tried to keep my expectations really level. They told me throughout this whole process that at any point, if I don’t meet one of their criteria, they’ll move on in a different direction. I tried to push down any expectation I had just because I didn’t want to get my hopes up and be let down. It was hard to not get excited. But I think I needed that to keep me grounded through the whole process.
Did you have concerns or fears at any point about getting brain surgery?
There were a couple of things that gave me pause, but I wouldn’t call them concerns. It was more that I needed to think through it and sort through my feelings and emotions and see if I was really ready to undertake what was coming my way.
The first is that I’m a quadriplegic, and all I really have is my brain. So letting someone go in there and mess around, it’s a big commitment. If something goes wrong, that’s kind of it for me. But I knew I wanted to help out, and I didn’t want to let my fears get in the way of that.
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?
No, it’s very easy. I’m constantly multitasking when I’m in sessions or when I’m playing around. I’ll throw on an audiobook or throw something on my TV and then play a game at the same time. It takes very little brain power. What I’m thinking the whole time is just where I want the cursor to go.
What devices are you able to use the Neuralink app on?
It’s just on a Macbook right now, but they’re planning on moving it onto other devices. It will move to a phone pretty soon, and we’ll continue going from there.
Neuralink put out a blog post recently about your first 100 days with the device, and it mentioned that some of the implant’s threads, which are dotted with electrodes that read your neural activity, pulled out of your brain. Did you notice a difference in functionality when that happened?
I could tell right away that something was wrong. I just started losing control of the cursor. That was about three weeks in, I would say. I thought it was something on their end, like they had changed something in the software that made it perform worse.
Were you aware that it was possible that the threads could come out?
I didn’t have any knowledge that it was possible. I don’t think they saw it in any of the animal trials. I had heard that it had maybe happened in one of the monkeys but that it was much different. It was never anticipated that it would happen in me.
But there were a lot of things that they didn’t expect with the human brain, like just how much it moves. It threw off a lot of their calculations for how things should be going.
How long did it take to recalibrate and get back to the cursor speed you were at before?
It took maybe two weeks. I remember the day that it happened. I was playing on it, and things just got better. It was just one little tweak that they had made on the software side, and from that point on things kept getting better and better.
Are you worried at all that more threads could pull out and the implant could stop working altogether?
Yeah, I’ve had fears about that. I’ve mentioned it to them. They have been very upfront with me and said that they don’t see any evidence of that. It seems like the threads have stabilized, and even some that were pulled out of my brain had found their way back in. I’m not worried about it now.
How has your life changed since getting the implant?
It’s just made me more independent, and that helps not only me but everyone around me. It makes me feel less helpless and like less of a burden. I love the fact that the people around me don’t have to wait on me so much. Outside of being completely healed, I believe what most quadriplegics want is independence.
What do you wish you could do with your implant that you can’t do right now? What does Telepathy 2.0 look like?
I mentioned this in [Neuralink’s] all-hands meeting, and I think it would be so freakin’ cool if I had a [Tesla] Optimus robot that I could control with it that would do basically everything for me and be a caretaker. It would eliminate probably 90 percent of the things that I need other people for. On top of that, it could connect to other things. I could connect to a car—a Tesla would be pretty cool, because they’re already self-driving. I would just need to find some way to get into it and set an address. Right now it’s a mission to get me anywhere. There are so many people, so many moving parts that are involved. If I could do all that on my own, man, it would change everything.
There are now a few dozen people around the world who have gotten BCIs. Have you met any of them?
No, I haven’t. I would like to. Maybe I need to take that first step and reach out. Maybe they’re all mad because I’ve been breaking world records.
You’ll have the implant for at least a year as part of the trial. Is there a scenario where you’d want to have it taken out?
My thinking through this whole process has been, it would benefit Neuralink if I left it in as long as possible, because I’ll have the longest case study of anyone. I would like to do that if it benefits them. That being said, if after a year I or Neuralink feels as if they’ve gotten what they can from me, and I’ve given what I can, then we’ll see. It also depends on how functional it is. I don’t expect it to lose any more function, but I never know what the future holds.
What has Neuralink told you about the possibility of getting an improved model?
I would love one, but they haven’t promised me anything. They’re not allowed to because it’s seen as an incentive. Since it’s a voluntary study, I’m not allowed to be incentivized at all in any way.
I hope that being the first short-lists me in some way, but if this is the extent of my participation, then that would be enough for me.
Neuralink is looking for a second trial participant. What would you say to that person?
I’m excited to have a buddy in this, someone to compare notes with. It will be nice to get a different perspective. I only have a few months on the next participant, but I want to help out in any way I can and be available for any questions they have. I guess my role in all this is sort of like a big brother.
What do you think is the next frontier for BCIs?
Being able to translate language in real time, I think that’s doable.
I know that BCIs don’t write into the brain yet, they just read. There’s no way to insert knowledge in there. But I think if we’re already at the reading step, then maybe writing comes next. That is a little bit of a scarier notion and something that I feel like a lot of people might not be too happy with. Maybe that’s something that needs to be thought out a bit more and taken a bit more carefully. But I think it’s a real possibility, and it’s a real bright future.
