Neuralink First Human Patient Can Move a Mouse With His Thoughts

Noland Arbaugh is paralyzed from the shoulders down. He’s also the first person with a Neuralink chip in his brain. Last month, I watched him play chess on a computer using only his thoughts.

It was both incredible and underwhelming.

The demo showed Arbaugh moving a cursor across a screen, clicking on chess pieces, making moves. No hands. Just thinking. When it worked, it was genuinely mind-blowing. But it didn’t always work. The cursor would drift. Clicks wouldn’t register. He’d have to recalibrate.

Neuralink’s not the first to do this. BrainGate researchers at Stanford achieved similar results in 2021. A paralyzed man typed 90 characters per minute using a brain implant—roughly the speed I’m typing now. That was three years ago, and we barely heard about it.

The difference? Elon Musk’s marketing machine.

I spoke with a neuroscientist who works on competing BCI technology. She asked to remain anonymous because, in her words, “criticizing Neuralink publicly is career suicide right now.” Her take: “They’re doing good engineering on existing science, not inventing new science.”

The implant itself is impressive—1,024 electrodes thinner than human hair, inserted by a surgical robot. It’s wireless, charges inductively, and reportedly smaller than previous designs. But the fundamental approach—reading motor cortex signals to control external devices—that’s been around for 20 years.

What Neuralink has that others don’t: $500 million in funding and FDA approval to run human trials. Most BCI research groups are universities begging for grants. Neuralink is a company that can move fast, break things, and iterate publicly.

The ethical questions are fascinating and terrifying. Arbaugh signed up knowing the risks. But what happens when this goes commercial? Who owns your brain data? If an ad company could measure your actual interest in products by reading neural signals, you think they wouldn’t?

There’s also the mortality problem. The electrodes work great for now. What about in five years? Ten? Brain tissue is hostile territory for electronics. Scar tissue forms. Signals degrade. Every previous BCI study has seen declining performance over time.

Musk promises Neuralink will eventually enable telepathy, memory backup, and merging with AI. That’s… ambitious. Right now, it can move a cursor and play chess. The gap between those two things is astronomical.

But here’s what matters: Arbaugh can play video games again. He can communicate faster. For him, this technology is life-changing. Not because it’s perfect. Because it’s possible.

The hype might be overblown. The science might be incremental. But if you’re paralyzed and someone offers you even a chance at more independence? You take it.

That’s the real story. Not the sci-fi future. The present that works just well enough to matter.