How Neuralink Will Change Gaming

The Neuralink MindPong Monkey is here, and the world of gaming will never be the same. So how is this monkey playing pong with no controller? And what does this mean for the future of video games? Let’s try and find out.

On April 9th we were all introduced to Pager, a nine year old macaque monkey who is owned by Elon Musk’s Neuralink company. If you’re new to the channel and haven’t seen any of our previous Neuralink videos, Neuralink specialize in Brain Computer Interface technology, also referred to as BCI. According to the company, Pager is the lucky recipient of two Neuralink BCI devices. So, he has computer chips implanted into his skull, one on the left side and one on the right side. Each Neuralink is wired directly into Pager’s brain with a network of tiny, thread-like probes - around 1 thousand per device. These probes were sown into his brain by an autonomous robot machine - that’s what makes this whole thing possible. The surgery is too precise for a human being to ever accomplish successfully. 

This is called an invasive BCI, because it’s inside the skull. There are non-invasive BCIs, you’ve probably seen those sensor hats that go on top of the head - those can read some signal from the brain, but not enough to really accomplish anything significant. You need to go invasive to get proper clarity in the signal. What sets Neuralink apart from other invasive BCI technology so far, is how small and self-contained the device is. The chip is only about the size of a coin. The Neuralink sits flush with the skull, inside a drilled hole and is covered with a flap of skin. So once the hair has a chance to grow back, no one would notice the implant is there. Once the device is installed, it can be wirelessly charged, just like an iphone.

What we’re seeing at the beginning of the video is the Neuralink device reading Pager’s brain waves as he manipulates the joystick to move the dot around the screen. The tiny wires are stuck into the monkey’s motor cortex and they are picking up on small electrical pulses that are fired from neurons in the brain as they activate to tell the hand what to do. All of the data that the implant collects is transmitted via Bluetooth to a computer that begins to decode the electrical signals. Neuralinks says that they then “calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce.”

Once they have that map created of which neurons fire to control which movements, then Neuralink unplugged the joystick and had Pager continue to play Pong. Now, instead of the game being controlled by a signal from the joystick, the neural decoder is moving the pong paddle based on the signals coming from the brain implant. At some point they remove the joystick completely and let Pager play the game hands free. When he does well, they give him a positive reinforcement with some banana smoothie from that tube in his mouth, that keeps him focused on playing the game. And he’s able to play really well. Because he’s associated moving the joystick with the movement of the paddle, all he has to do is think about moving the paddle to fire the associated neurons.

Now, it’s important to remember that this is just a product demo of a device that is in the very early stages of development. The point of this is actually not that the monkey is playing Pong, that aspect is just marketing - it’s fun and it’s shareable and makes for good click bait. There are a couple of big points that we should be taking away from this: number one, that the monkey is alive and well after having two Neuralinks installed in his brain and he doesn’t really appear to be different from any other monkey. Number two, the system is actually working effectively as it is - the device is actually tracking the neural impulses and the decoder is accurately reading the data and converting it into software commands.

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This is a big step up from the previous Neuralink demo that we saw in August of last year. At that point they were mostly able to just associate a pig’s nose touching things with a series of beeps from the computer. That was interesting, but playing a video game is a much more practical application. Also, with the pigs as a safety demonstration, I doubt that your average person could really spot the difference between a brain damaged pig and a normal one. With the monkey, it’s much easier to tell if he’s come out of the procedure just fine.

A few scientists were very quick to note that having a monkey control a computer with their mind is nothing new and not actually very impressive. And yeah, they’re absolutely right. The first major research project to involve a monkey moving a computer cursor with their brain dates back to 2002. This was done by the department of neuroscience at Brown University. Really, it goes back even further than that - In 1969, a researcher called Eberhard Fetz connected a needle on a meter to a single neuron in a monkey's brain, and was able to train the monkey to move that needle using only its brain activity. 

Again, the monkey playing pong is not the breakthrough here. If it were so easy to do this kind of brain computer interface, like many scientists would claim, then why isn’t this common place by now? Why aren’t we seeing pictures and videos of these other brain computer interfacing monkeys? Well, you won’t find many pictures of previous monkey brain implant experiments because the ones that do surface when you look for them are pretty horrific, the monkeys are clearly not having a good day and they probably want the tops of their heads back. While Pager over there at Neuralink is kicking it, playing video games and drinking smoothies.

So Neuralink are not trying to be better neuroscientists, they’re trying to be better engineers. Which tracks with Elon’s other companies. Tesla didn’t invent electric cars, they just made them better and more appealing. SpaceX didn’t invent rockets, but they were the first and only ones to figure out how to make them land after they fly. Neuralink is just taking brain computer interface and making it safer, more practical and making the product scalable. That’s the big deal here.

Neuralink could have a whole army of MindPong playing monkeys up and running in a matter of weeks. They could have hundreds of the little guys because the Neuralink is basically just a fitbit, there’s not much to it, and the probe stitching robot makes the implant procedure extremely fast and reliable. Neuralink is the only company in the world right now who could do that. They could even put one of these in you, right now, and get you playing video games with your mind in no time. The Neuralink product is easily scalable to high volume distribution, that gives them a clear path to a profitable business model. If anyone who wants one and can afford to get one is able to, then they will and Neuralink will make money, a lot of it.

Obviously that’s not the way that science works. They’re going to have to do a bunch more monkey experiments before they get the green light to start testing on humans. But Elon and Neuralink are confident that human trials are coming as early as this year, probably happening by late 2021. And again, the first wave of trials will not be about playing video games, it will be about trying to help people with disabilities. Instead of playing pong with their mind, human Neuralink users should be able to control a computer or a smartphone with their thoughts alone, and do things like typing or surfing the web. For someone who is suffering from paralysis and can’t use their hands, this would be a massive improvement in the quality of their life.

So after we finish the clinical trials and after we prioritize people who actually need this technology to improve their lives. Then yeah, as long as you have around 10 grand to spare, then you can get yourself a Neuralink and start using it to play video games. There are a couple of obvious applications that should work right off the bat. For one, any computer game would now be playable without the need for any physical control hardware. All you would need to do is think about pressing the W key or clicking the mouse and the computer would receive that signal. I imagine the process would be a lot like with the monkey where you would first have to game with a controller while the Neuralink is active and calibrating to how your neurons are firing and what inputs are being triggered on the computer. Then, after the system has learned, you could take away the keyboard and mouse and start to play hands free. The advantage of this, obviously, would be a massive reduction in latency. Imagine the most amazing gaming mouse ever made, this would be 100 times better. Instead of signal going brain to hand to mouse to computer, it goes straight from brain to computer, no middle man. The second really cool application would be VR. You could do virtual reality gaming without the weird gloves on your hands or controllers or anything, you wouldn’t need to even move your arms really, though that would take some of the fun out of the whole thing. Either way, the experience would become much more realistic and intuitive.

Now, that’s just talking about the Neuralink as an output device, reading your brain impulses and sending signals out. But could it work the other way? Could a Neuralink receive signals from a game and trigger your actual senses in your brain? Maybe even your vision and hearing? That would be crazy. Virtual reality without even the headset, no external hardware necessary. That’s a lot more difficult, obviously. We’d be trying to bypass some of the most complex organs in the human body, the eyes and ears. Elon certainly thinks it’s possible, but really not any time soon. When someone asked on Twitter about Neuralink providing an optical feed to help blind people see, Elon responded that it could possibly happen with Neuralink version 2 hardware and is highly likely by version 3. We’re still years away from Neuralink version one hitting the market, and who knows how long the gap will be between hardware updates. So, we’ll get there some day, but definitely not soon. Especially when Elon says something is coming soon, he’s usually way off and it takes twice as long in real life. So maybe Neuralink version 5 or 6, we might start to get input capabilities. But that’s where things really start to get nuts, if the whole experience of a game or movie were being piped straight into your mind. Gaming might become more like lucid dreaming than anything we know today. It’s almost scary when you really start to think about it too hard, people could just get lost in their own minds.