Arbaugh said that Neuralink has told him around 15% of the threads inserted in his brain remain in place. But these have stabilized, he said, and software changes made by the company later helped him regain many of the device’s capabilities, which he has since demonstrated in livestreams.
Since such a device had never been implanted in a human before, Neuralink didn’t know how much the brain would move inside the skull, said Arbaugh. It found that his brain moved up to three times what the company expected, he said.
To keep threads in place, one of Neuralink’s proposed solutions that the FDA has signed off on is to implant them eight millimeters into the brain’s motor cortex, compared with about three-to-five millimeters for Arbaugh.
With the FDA’s blessing, Neuralink now hopes to implant a second participant sometime in June, according to the person familiar with the company, who said that more than 1,000 quadriplegics have signed up for its patient registry, though fewer than 100 qualify for the study.
And while some of those people are eligible, Musk posted on X on Thursday that the company is still accepting applications.
Neuralink aims to implant 10 people with its device this year and hopes to have a diverse set of recipients in order to study a variety of behaviors. One challenge is that the people signing up to its patient registry skew white and male, the person said.
Better informed about medical advances? Higher risk tolerance? Coincidence?