“Sometimes I Forget I'm Paralyzed.” How Neuralink’s First Patient Found Freedom by Connecting His Brain to a Computer.

Noland Arbaugh gave Elon Musk's brain computer interface company access to his mind in early 2024. His risk opened up new worlds and possibilities.

Noland Arbaugh and his mother Mia

The desert daylight was fading when Noland Arbaugh DM’d me to drive over to his Yuma, Arizona home. The 30-year-old quadriplegic cannot operate a phone by hand, can’t type on a laptop, and wasn’t able to fully operate a computer a year ago. But using just the thoughts in his brain, Arbaugh scrolled his cursor to my X account, clicked into our conversation, and dictated the message, “You can come now.”

Arbaugh was a camp counselor eight years ago when he jumped in a lake with three friends. They ran in, got waist deep, and dove. It was a designated swimming area, with no large rocks or debris, but an errant kick likely caught him in the wrong part of his head. Two swimmers came up, Arbaugh did not. He laid there face down in the water, paralyzed, and held his breath until he couldn’t. As the water flooded his lungs, he waited, helpless. He was pulled out of the lake just in time to save his life.

For four months, Arbaugh stayed in the hospital. He got emergency surgery, floated in and out of consciousness, and recovered as best he could. Everything from his neck down lost sensation. It’s not that it was numb. The feeling just wasn’t there.

In his 20s and confined to a chair, Arbaugh drank, smoked weed, and spent time with his thoughts. He replayed his life. Examining. Introspecting. And, eventually, changing. He ditched the drugs. Centered himself in faith. And made the most of his unique existence. Being paralyzed isn’t that bad, he says, you just sit there and people help you out.

Then, in 2022, Arbaugh got a call. His friend was drunk at 11 a.m. and browsing through SpaceX news when he stumbled upon Neuralink. “Hey, do you want to get a chip in your brain?” he asked. Arbaugh agreed. And that day, with Arbaugh dictating over the phone, they applied.

Neuralink is a brain computer interface company that Elon Musk and eight scientists founded in 2016. Its mission is to connect human brains to computers so that AI doesn’t get bored by our limited ability to output information via speech and writing. Merging humans with AI, Musk believes, is the best way to align both of our interests. And so after its founding, Neuralink began looking for ways to make the connection.

Connecting human brains to computers might sound outlandish, but the human body’s electrical communication system makes it possible. When we move, neurons in our brain send electric signals to the nervous system that translate to action. When we see and hear, sensory neurons transmit that information to our brains which makes sense of it. The spinal cord is the key conduit from the brain to the rest of the body. And when it ruptures, as Arbaugh’s did, the electrical signals don’t reach their destination, resulting in paralysis.

Read the signals, however, and you can turn them into action. And earlier this year, after much-debated experimentation reading monkey brain signals, Neuralink was ready to try with a human brain.

Arbaugh didn’t love his chances to get selected in the company’s first human trial. He hadn’t regained much movement or feeling in seven years since his injury. And his inability to conjure a miracle didn’t make him hopeful. But Neuralink sent an email inviting him to apply formally, and so he picked the first of twenty time slots, hoping it would make him stand out.

During that initial call, Neuralink staff asked for basic biographical questions and wanted to make sure Arbaugh was actually paralyzed. For its first human trial, the company would attempt to read electrical signals in human brains and translate those signals to cursor movement and clicks on a computer screen. This would be a medical trial, involving brain surgery, and it was meant for those who it could help.

Arbaugh passed one screening, then another, and his momentum built. Neuralink staff asked more detailed questions about his medical history, his lifestyle, and where he lived. They put him on the phone with surgeons, a psychiatrist, and sent him to Phoenix for eight hours of testing at a neurological institute.

“The day I went up and got all the testing,” he tells me, “It became very, very real.”

There was nothing light touch about the surgery Neuralink was contemplating for Arbaugh. The company wanted to drill a large hole in the top of his skull and insert sixty four fibers into his brain’s motor cortex, which controls movement. The fibers, each thinner than a human hair, would contain a total of 1,024 electrodes. These sensors could read the electrical signals the brain was attempting to send to his limbs. Neuralink would then attach the fibers to a device that could send those signals to a computer. It would use the device itself to plug the hole left by the cutaway skull.

A month after Arbaugh’s testing, Neuralink called and told him he was in. Not only that, he had option to go first if he’d like. The first device would likely be the worst Neuralink ever made. But Arbaugh decided he wanted it. “It’s always cool to be first,” he says. “And I would never forgive myself if I passed it up and someone else was hurt.”

Before surgery, Arbaugh schemed a prank with a friend. He’d wake up from the operation, look at his mother Mia, and pretend the new device wiped his memory clean. Groggy from anesthesia, he looked at her and asked, “Who are you?” A few moments later he came clean, and the suddenly-less-furious Mia realized he was the same exact son who went into the operation room. “I was upset,” she says. “But thinking about it, it was pretty funny.”

Signals On A Screen

Neuralink didn’t build the first brain computer interface, and the scientific discipline is actually pretty old. In the 1970s, researchers at UCLA showed brain current could be used to move a cursor. And in the early 2000s, a device called the Utah Array — that can both record brain signals and stimulate them — received clearance from the FDA. Today, advances in machine learning, robotics, and electrical engineering are helping push the field to the next level. No achievement seems fully out of reach: From simulating sensation to restoring vision, and almost everything in between.

In the recovery room, Arbaugh became a firsthand participant in this moment in history. The day after surgery, Neuralink staff turned on his device, connected it to a tablet, and showed him the brain signals it was picking up across eight channels. Arbaugh attempted to wiggle his fingers and toes, sending the signal to limbs that he could not move due to his injury. When he attempted to move his right index finger, a well-defined, yellow spike showed up on the screen. He found himself able to generate the same spikes repeatedly with the same attempted movement.

“I told them, look at the third box on the top. Right now. Now. And Now. That’s my index finger,” he says. “And everyone freaked out.”

Using machine learning and some calibration, Neuralink built an app called Link that translated those spikes into action on a screen. And soon, Arbaugh was controlling his computer using just his mind, scrolling and clicking through the web.

As he used his new device, Arbaugh began to notice something remarkable. The device was picking up his intentions and moving his cursor before he even attempted to move it. Since everything was happening in his brain, he didn’t need to navigate the body’s pathways to generate movement. As soon as he decided to move, there the cursor went. This turned Arbaugh superhuman, at least in this one area. He anticipates that video game leagues will eventually consider brain implants akin to a performance enhancing drug, or decide to create a separate division for people like him.

But it is the normal, little stuff that’s most meaningful to Arbaugh. With easy access to a computer, he’s been freed, in a sense, from his confinement. “I’m interacting with people through a computer with the Neuralink from my bed as a quadriplegic like any person could,” he says. “Sometimes I forget that I'm even paralyzed.”

Now, Arbaugh is open to an array of new possibilities. He’s thinking about going to school, getting a job, or learning to edit video. As we speak, he peppers my film crew with questions about the craft. He is shocked by the price of the tripod. Above all, he can communicate online, hopping into text threads and DMs as he did with me, with efficiency he could never dream of before Neuralink. “I really have just blossomed into a social butterfly with all of this,” he says.

SciFi and Risks

I’ve seen four technological miracles in my life. The iPhone, ChatGPT, Waymo, and the Neuralink. All four made me question technology’s limits by smashing the outer bounds of what I thought possible. So it’s easy to forget that this version of Neuralink is just a step toward a broader, even crazier vision.

We’re still far away from Musk’s goal of merging with artificial intelligence, and the ability to do so isn’t yet a certainty, but we’re likely to encounter some wild possibilities on the way there. Neuralink today, for instance, can read brain signals but not write them. But that will change over time. Attempts to recreate vision for the blind, by writing electrical signals into the visual cortex, are coming. The FDA gave Neuralink’s Blindsight device, which will be used for this purpose, a Breakthrough Device Designation, clearing its way for testing. Other projects are restoring some sensation for those who’ve lost it.

Once you start writing signals into the brain though, it can take weird directions.

In 1954, two McGill University researchers inserted electrodes into rat brains and allowed them to simulate pleasure with electrical signals whenever they pushed a lever. The rats pretty much did nothing else. One ambitious rat pressed the pleasure lever 7,500 times within a 12 hour window, at a rate of 742 presses per hour.

Taking the leap to simulating pleasure, sex, or even drug trips, via brain computer interfaces isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. “If you let your imagination branch for a little bit, what can you write back into the brain? The answer is, potentially anything,” Ignacio Saez, an associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who worked on a study this year that put more than 4,000 electrodes in a human brain, tells me. “That creates huge ethical challenges that the field needs to face sooner.”

It’s getting late in Yuma as I run these scenarios by Arbaugh. To him, every option seems worth exploring. “Technology is just a tool for us to use,” he says. “And we can use it for good. We can use it for bad. People will use it for bad. People will use it for good. And I think the good will far outweigh the bad.”

It’s clear that this hopeful attitude is why Arbaugh is controlling a computer with his mind today, but his path is not without risk. We’re still finding out just how long a human body can tolerate a brain computer interface like a Neuralink. And Arbaugh’s trusted a company that may not be around forever with his brain, an important organ for someone in his situation.

Yet even though the device in Arbaugh’s brain may just be a stop on the path to broader ambition, it was hard to leave his home without an appreciation for how remarkable this technology already is today. And indeed, how remarkable Arbaugh is for taking a chance in the name of technological progress, and personal liberation.