Jeney Kleeman
Noland Arbaugh’s life changed in a fraction of a second in June 2016. He was a 22-year-old student, working at a kids’ summer camp in upstate New York, when he went swimming in a lake. He can’t tell me exactly what happened, but thinks one of his friends must have accidentally struck him very hard in the side of his head as they ran into the water and plunged beneath the surface.
When he woke up face down in the water, unable to move or breathe, Noland immediately knew he was paralysed. But he didn’t panic. He felt no fear at all, he says. “You never know what you’re going to do in those high-stress situations. I found out that day that it’s hard to shake me. I am very, very calm under pressure.”
Elon Musk would ultimately turn this quality to his advantage when, after nearly eight years of being quadriplegic, Noland agreed to allow the world’s richest man to implant an electronic chip into his brain. In January 2024, Noland became the first human recipient of a brain-computer interface (BCI) developed by Musk’s company, Neuralink. If it worked, it would allow him to control a computer using only the power of his mind.
Only four months after he first heard about Neuralink, Noland was on an operating table, with a purpose-built robot poised to insert the N1 chip into his motor cortex. The stakes could not have been higher for him: he was risking infection, haemorrhage and brain damage. “My brain is the last part of myself that I really feel I have control over,” he tells me from his wheelchair at his kitchen table in Yuma, Arizona. But the stakes for humankind, too, were very great: if Neuralink succeeds, the world’s most powerful billionaire will have fulfilled his science-fiction-fuelled dreams of melding minds with machines.
What kind of person chooses to be Elon Musk’s guinea pig? And, once the experiment is over, what happens next – for Noland, and for the rest of us?
Noland’s world is in a different universe to Musk’s. Now 30, he lives in the same simple, single-storey house in the dusty military town in the Sonoran desert where he grew up. He left for an international studies degree at Texas A&M University, only to move back after his accident so that his mother, Mia, stepfather and half-brother could take care of him. The words “Be grateful for small things, big things and everything in between” are stencilled on the kitchen wall. Goats, chickens and a plump turkey named Hope roam the back yard. Two golden retrievers and an enormous goldendoodle pad around the kitchen, occasionally pushing their noses into my lap.
Noland has an electric wheelchair that he can operate using a mouthpiece; his forearms lie still on the brightly upholstered armrests. Every so often, Mia reaches forward to uncurl his fingers, or offer him a sip of coffee from a straw in a Big Gulp cup, or swat away the flies that buzz around his face in the merciless Arizona heat. He asks her to roll up his shirt to show me a sleeve of tattoos on his arm. “I got it done after my accident because it didn’t hurt,” he grins. Two bracelets are inked on to his wrist; a permanent rendering of ones given to him by the girls who pulled him out of the water in 2016.
Before his accident, Noland was outdoorsy and athletic, playing football, American football, basketball, rugby and golf. He liked to go hunting and shooting deer with his family. He was musical, too, playing bass in a rock band, and he performed in high school theatre productions. He loved Xbox and PlayStation, but was never really into tech. A shelf next to us is still crammed with the board games he used to play: Settlers of Catan; The Game of Life.
Mia worked at their church, and Noland was a student leader there. His faith was a huge part of his life, growing up. “I always wanted to make it through college as a Christian,” he says. “That lasted about a week. I was sleeping around, I was doing drugs, I was drinking a lot.” He sees his accident as divine intervention. “It was God pulling me back. I really do think that it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
The blow to Noland’s head didn’t break his neck – it dislocated it, and his vertebra went back into place immediately – but it left his spinal cord severely damaged. The higher up a serious spinal cord injury is, the more extensive the paralysis. Superman actor Christopher Reeve shattered his first and second vertebra, and could not hold up his head without assistance. Noland’s injury was around his fourth and fifth vertebrae, so he can move his head and shoulders, and express himself with nods and shrugs, which he often does. He uses the word “luck” a lot. “I was really lucky that I wasn’t ventilated for my entire life,” he says. “I was really lucky that I didn’t have a traumatic brain injury.”
At first, there were “a lot of promising signs” that his condition might improve, but he ultimately never recovered much movement. At the beginning of his adult life, he was facing a lifetime of dependency.
“I have to rely on my family for everything: to give me a shower, to help with bowel movements and urination.” Noland was a smoker, and if he wanted a cigarette he would have to ask someone to take him outside, put one in his mouth, light it and get rid of the ash for him. He liked to smoke weed, too (it’s legal in Arizona).
“I didn’t like him smoking, but he’s an adult. It was hard,” Mia tells me. She looks over to him. “I’m your mom. Of course, I’m going to give my two cents.”
“I’m a grown man,” Noland says. “To have to rely on other people to do it – it really, reallysucked.” He reluctantly gave up a couple of years ago, unable to bear the guilt of exposing his carers to secondhand smoke.
“Another thing people take for granted, just being able to text someone privately, is not easy as a quadriplegic. If I want to dictate something, it’s like yelling out to the world what I’m saying …”
“‘I love you!’” shouts Mia.
“… I just didn’t have a way to build my life privately.”
There was an iPad Noland could use. “I’d have a stick that I would hold in my mouth, with a little piece of conductive fabric on the end of it, and I would touch my iPad and use it in that way. I did that for years.” But it was frustrating. He had to be put into the right position by other people. Texting with the mouth stick was very slow, and if Noland wanted to use dictation he had to speak with the stick in his mouth. If it fell out, he’d have to call for help. “It’s not very easy. And then there wasn’t a whole lot I could do on it. I mean – it’s an iPad. You can’t do all the same things you can do on a computer.”
He asks Mia to open his laptop in front of him on the kitchen table. He turns towards the screen.
“Implant connect,” he says.
And he begins to play chess, moving pieces across the board with swift, deft cursor movements, while his hands remain motionless on the armrests of his wheelchair. He’s been playing against some of the Neuralink engineers for a few months, he tells me as he takes someone’s pawn. “None of them are very good, so it’s not too hard.”
Next, he’s browsing the internet, opening X, checking his DMs, composing a message by directing his cursor across a virtual keyboard. Now he’s slaying baddies, darting back and forth with a reaper’s scythe in a game called Vampire Survivors. “I love this game,” he says, looking over to me while keeping control of the cursor. He completes a level and digital confetti rains down the screen.
It’s extraordinary, but also totally unremarkable: Noland is using a computer like anyone else does; he’s just not moving his body at all. “Sometimes I forget how impressive it is, because it’s so natural to me,” he says, shrugging again.
In some respects, Noland is better at using a computer than the rest of us. When he first received the Neuralink implant, he tells me, all he wanted to do was play video games. He challenged his friends to a multiplayer version of Civilization VI, called Red Death. “It is absolutely a game of speed, a test of speed. Whoever’s quickest to the draw wins. And I was beating them.” His eyes are wide. “It blew my mind. Just that one little taste made me realise that this technology is going to change the world.”
There’s nothing new about BCIs. The first experiments involving chips and animal brains began in the late 1960s. The gold standard in human BCI design, the Utah Array – a square matrix of needles inserted 1.5mm into the brain – was developed in 1992. Two decades before Noland’s surgery, in 2004, a quadriplegic man called Matthew Nagle became the first person to have a chip implanted inside his skull. While no regulator has yet allowed BCIs to be used outside an experimental setting, enough people have them for an online forum, BCI Pioneers, to exist for the community.
But Noland is the first to try out the chip produced by an entrepreneur whose explicit aim is to find a way to feed information into the brain, as well as receiving from it – a man who has proved to be all too willing to tip the scales of social media to beam his thoughts into millions of people’s phones with real-world consequences, promoting far-right figures in the UK and Germany, and fuelling riots across England last summer.
The theory behind BCIs is relatively simple: they read the electrical signals produced by neurons and turn them into computer commands. (The brain cells of a quadriplegic person are still firing, after all, but the signals are prevented from travelling down the spinal cord.) BCIs can connect to the brain either through a wearable device, such as a cap, or by being surgically attached to brain tissue. The closer the device is to the brain cells, the more accurately it can translate the signals.
Neuralink’s N1 chip is wireless and aimed to be smaller and more powerful than any that had gone before. (It’s about the size of a 50p coin.) While the Utah Array had 100 electrodes reading signals from targeted neurons, the brochure used to recruit Noland – which resembles an ad for an Apple product – boasts of “1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair”. Those 64 threads are inserted “reliably and efficiently” 3.5mm into the cortex of the brain by Neuralink’s R1 surgical robot.
In his authorised biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson describes how the billionaire first began thinking about implanting chips in brains in 2016, when he was travelling in a car with his chief of staff, Sam Teller, and became frustrated by how long it took for him to type a message on his iPhone. “Imagine if you could think into the machine,” Musk said, “like a high-speed connection directly between your mind and your machine.” Musk immediately asked Teller to find him a neuroscientist who could help him understand BCIs.
Many of Musk’s ventures have been influenced by his love of science fiction, from reusable rocket ships (SpaceX), electric cars and humanoid robots (Tesla) to hyperloops for mass transit in autonomous pods (The Boring Company). Neuralink is inspired by the Culture series of novels by Iain M Banks, which Musk has singled out for praise. Banks describes a brain implant called a “neural lace” that is implanted in childhood, and can read and store every thought and sensation a person experiences. “When I first read Banks, it struck me that this idea had a chance of protecting us on the artificial intelligence front,” Musk told Isaacson.
“Everything that you’ve ever experienced in your whole life – smell, emotions – all of those are electrical signals,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman in August. “If you trigger the right neuron, you could trigger a particular scent. You could certainly make things glow. You can think of the brain as a biological computer.” As such, the brain could be harnessed – or hacked.
Musk hopes the enhanced human brain will be able to keep one step ahead of – or at least keep up with – computers. “If we can find good commercial uses to fund Neuralink, then in a few decades, we will get to our ultimate goal of protecting us against evil AI by tightly coupling the human world to our digital machinery,” he told Isaacson. His first commercial target was augmenting people with quadriplegia.
Of the eight-strong team of neuroscientists and engineers who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, only one remains. Former employees have complained of being under pressure to produce results within rushed timelines. But those who stayed with the company were able to create the kind of eye-catching stunts Musk was looking for.
In an event livestreamed on YouTube in August 2020, Musk unveiled Gertrude the pig, who had been living with a Neuralink chip nestled under her skull for two months. He showed how Gertrude’s movements were being read by the chip and wirelessly transmitted to a computer. “I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know,” Musk said. “Maybe I do.” (In response to the demo, MIT Technology Review said Neuralink was simply “neuroscience theater”.) Eight months later, Neuralink released a video of a macaque named Pager playing the video game Pong using only the power of his mind. When he scored well, he was rewarded with a sip of banana smoothie.
The company was swiftly dogged with allegations of animal cruelty, with a Wired investigation detailing vet records containing “gruesome portrayals of suffering endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects”. (The US Department of Agriculture ultimately reported that it could not find any violations of animal research rules when it inspected the facilities in 2023.)
In September 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Neuralink an investigational device exemption that allowed them to recruit participants for the first ever human trials. Neuralink’s Prime study aimed to demonstrate that the NI implant was “safe and useful in daily life”. All they needed was the right human being.
In the years after his accident, Noland did whatever he could to increase his chances of regaining some of what he had lost. He added his name to the largest database for spinal cord injury studies in North America, but was never chosen to take part. He thinks it was because he was honest about being a smoker on the questionnaire. He was told that if he tried to move as much as possible – wiggling his fingers, rotating his wrists – his brain might create new neural pathways. Night after night, he’d lie in bed with his eyes closed, focusing on trying to move. “You think: ‘Oh, I’m finally moving – I can feel myself moving!’ You open your eyes and look, and nothing is happening. It’s really frustrating.”
Then, on 19 September 2023, a friend rang him. “He’s a big Elon Musk fan. He knew all about Neuralink. And when he saw that the human trials had opened up, the first thing he did was give me a call.”
At that time, Noland says he only knew “what the average person knows” about Musk: “Tesla owner, SpaceX, Starlink, richest man in the world sort of thing. Darling of the left for years, spoke out about a couple of things, the left basically turned against him, and then he started making his way towards the right.” He knew nothing about Neuralink, but his view on Musk was clear: “He is one of the most impressive men that have lived in my lifetime. People can not like him for a lot of different reasons, but what he’s doing – pushing the boundaries of space travel, the cars, the internet – it’s incredible.”
His friend helped him fill out the online application on the day the trial opened. His first interview was just three days later, on a Friday. The following Monday, he had his second interview.
Determined to stand out, Noland chose the first available slot for every interview, but he didn’t hold out much hope of being chosen. “Other quadriplegics go out and do things with their lives; I came home after my accident and lived with my parents. I thought they’d probably want someone more impressive.”
It’s obvious to me that he is the perfect candidate: a warm, likable, earnest person whose future was taken from him by a twist of fate at the start of his adult life. From a PR perspective, he’d clearly be a fantastic choice. But Noland really doesn’t see it.
There were several rounds of interviews and assessments. Noland was sent to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight hours of scans, blood tests, urine tests, memory tests and psychological evaluations. The Neuralink team spoke to Mia, too. “They asked if we had any concerns, questions, doubts or anything,” she says. “Noly used to send me stuff to read. I didn’t want to know every detail. I just wanted to be as supportive as I could.”
Noland agreed to be part of Neuralink’s Prime study for six years; he had to sign a 35-page consent form, which included what he describes as a “laundry list” of risks. In early January 2024, he got the call telling him he had officially been selected to be the first person to have a Neuralink chip. His surgery would be in two weeks.
Even though it all happened so fast, Noland said he was ready for anything. “I’m good at lying there and thinking through every possible scenario. I told my parents: ‘If I have any sort of brain injury, then I don’t want to live with you any more – I want you to put me in a home.’ I did everything I needed to do. I was so at peace.”
“I got a little bit worried and nervous, because he’s already been through so much,” Mia tells me, making a twisting motion with her fists over her stomach. “But you just look at Noland and you think: ‘He’s got this; he’s excited.’ That helped a lot.”
Musk was supposed to be at the Barrow Neurological Institute on the morning of Noland’s surgery, on 29 January 2024. “I guess something happened with his plane – a malfunction or something – so he couldn’t make it,” Noland says. They FaceTimed just before he went into theatre. “It lasted maybe a minute. ‘Hey, I’m really excited. Thank you. This is such a cool thing, what you’re doing, it’s awesome.’ That’s what I was saying to him,” he says, smiling. “He was like: ‘You’re gonna be making history,’ things like that.” Noland was unfazed to be speaking to the world’s richest man. “He’s a regular guy – just much more impressive and a little bit more eccentric.”
The surgery took less than two hours. He shows me a picture on his phone of the large L-shaped incision on his shaved head. There’s nothing to see now: shaggy dark hair covers the scar. “They took out a piece of my skull and then replaced my skull with the chip. My skin is over the top,” he says, letting me feel the spongy place on his scalp where there is no longer any bone.
Musk arrived with his entourage when Noland was still groggy from the anaesthetic. He thanked Noland, and told him the surgery had been a success. A little later, a 10-strong Neuralink team came in to wake up the implant. When they switched it on and could see it had connected with a tablet that was receiving real-time information from Noland’s brain cells, some of them burst into tears. “I was trying to move my finger, like I’d done a million times, and I saw a big yellow spike [on the screen].” The whole room erupted with applause.
Next, Noland and the chip had to learn how to work together: the human learning how to create the best signals with his mind, the computer how to correctly decode them. Noland still does four hours a day of what he calls “session” work for Neuralink, performing exercises such as clicking targets on a screen to fine-tune the cursor control.
But it quickly became second nature to him. At first, he used what he calls “attempted” movements: he would try to move his hand and the cursor would move where he was trying to get his hand to go. But then he became able to direct it with “imagined” movements: he was no longer trying to move anything apart from the cursor itself.
“You’re not thinking about doing it – you’re just willing the cursor to go wherever you want.” His eyes are wide. “When I first moved it with imagined movement, it blew my mind. It was crazy. That was two weeks in, and I was giddy all day. That was when it all became real to me.”
It sounds like telekinesis, I say. Noland shrugs. “I called it telekinesis – you’re moving something with your mind – but Elon Musk called it telepathy, because I’m communicating with a computer through my mind.”
Musk’s goal is not to allow quadriplegics to move things, after all – it’s for minds to have seamless interfaces with computers.
But it has been far from seamless for Noland. At first, he was frustrated that he had to stop using the implant every five or six hours so he could charge it. But the Neuralink team managed to find a fix, and now he can use the N1 continuously, wearing a baseball cap fitted with a coil that has been charged from the mains whenever the battery is low.
Then, a month after his surgery, the worst happened: the implant began to stop working. He started to lose control of the cursor. It came to a head when he travelled to Fremont to visit Neuralink’s California facility and demonstrate his new skills. Noland assumed the team must have tinkered with the software. “I was like: ‘You guys need to fix this. I’m here to play Mario Kart with Neuralink. I can’t have you guys messing around with things right before I do that.’”
Just before he arrived, the team informed him that when they’d performed the surgery they hadn’t factored in how much his brain moves, pulsing with each heartbeat. The threads had started retracting as soon as they had been implanted; now 85% of them were out of place, their electrodes picking up nothing at all.
“It was really bad. I was getting it all taken away from me. That was really, really hard,” says Noland.
“He cried,” says Mia. “We gave him time. He didn’t want us around him.”
Noland nods. “I cried in my van right before we went over to Neuralink.”
He asked the team to “do whatever they needed to do to fix it. Go in and do another surgery.” But the neurosurgeon was reluctant to operate on him again, he says. Instead, Neuralink engineers tweaked the software, so that the remaining 15% of the threads read groups of neuron signals, instead of signals from individual cells. So far, it works.
Noland’s main frustration now is how he types – by moving his cursor to click individual letters on a keyboard. It’s nowhere near the kind of mind-to-screen text output that Musk dreamed of when he founded Neuralink. “We have gotten up to almost 25 words a minute, but dictation is still better. We’ll see how that goes over time.”
He knows that his Neuralink chip will always be the worst. In August 2024, the company announced that a second trial participant – an anonymous quadriplegic man who has chosen not to meet or speak to Noland – had received an implant. With his superior chip, “Alex” is able to design three-dimensional objects using the power of his mind. None of his threads have retracted. Last month, Musk revealed that a third – also unnamed – person had now received a Neuralink chip.
Is Noland envious of those who will come after him? “A little bit,” he concedes. “I’m really excited for them though.”
Although relentlessly positive, Noland recognises the dark possibilities of the technology lodged in his brain. Neuralink says it doesn’t monitor his brain or track what he does online, but warned him that someone might be able to “reverse engineer” the data produced by his neurons to work out what he’s been looking at. “With that in mind, I keep it very PG,” he tells me.
On the day of the US presidential election, Noland tweeted a headline from the satirical website the Onion: “Neuralink Patient Unable To Stop Hand From Voting For Trump.” “So true,” he joked. (He voted for Trump of his own free will.) Five days later, he asked his followers what the “biggest moral and ethical concerns” of a Neuralink implant could be.
“Kids might use it to cheat in school,” one responded.
“Hacking them and taking over a user,” said another.
“The ability for others to read your mind … and interfere with it,” said a third.
Why ask the question? “It’s something I get asked constantly, and I don’t have good answers.” But he’s clearly thought about it. When I ask him what a bad use of a BCI might be, he reels off a list. “Mind control, body control. At this point, it’s only reading my signals, but it will be able to write at some point, and sending signals into the brain can be scary. You could make people see anything, experience different feelings, emotions, hallucinations …”
Musk is excited about a future where Neuralink sends signals to the brain. He explored the possibilities with Isaacson. “Want to see infrared, ultraviolet? How about radio waves or radar?” In a presentation in 2022, Musk described how the ability for Neuralink to write on the brain would allow someone born blind to see. He also said he was “confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to somebody who has a severed spinal cord” using chips implanted below the site of injury.
The billionaire’s extraordinary ambitions have so far been able to go almost unchecked. Neuralink hasn’t registered its human trials at the publicly accessible database ClinicalTrials.gov, and has made very few details about its research public. This avoidance of external scrutiny has led medical ethicists to describe Neuralink as “science by press release”. Musk’s impatience for eye-catching results is likely to increase now that Neuralink has serious competition from other startups, both in the US and in China, where companies are focusing on non-therapeutic BCIs that could enhance cognition among the general population.
In August, Musk said that hundreds of millions of people will have a Neuralink implant within the next two decades. “If it’s extremely safe, and you can have superhuman abilities – let’s say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn’t lose memories – then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it,” he added. This is either the ultimate in wearable tech or Black Mirror dystopia, depending on your point of view. “I might get it …” Joe Rogan, the US podcaster, remarked last year. “I don’t want to be the only person who can’t read minds.”
It might all be hype and bluster. But it’s possible to imagine a future where the sum total of all human knowledge is available to anyone with a brain implant. They could switch off their anxiety – or their empathy – as required. With total recall of every moment in their lives and every piece of information they ever encountered, every problem solved before the conscious mind could consider it, life for these people would be pretty much frictionless. In that world, wouldn’t there be incredible inequality between those who had BCIs and those who didn’t?
“If you think about all technology today, there are people who have the money to use things and people who don’t,” Noland says when I put this to him. “I know Elon wants to produce it to scale, and make it cheap and affordable.” He shrugs. “It’s not fair, but life isn’t fair.”
FDA rules mean Neuralink can’t pay Noland for his participation in the research, or contribute to the cost of his care. His house isn’t fully accessible; for the last eight years, he has been showering outside in his back yard. “There’s no privacy. But we didn’t have the money to build a shower for me. That’s something that we’ve always wanted.”
Since becoming the human face of Neuralink, Noland has amassed more than 128,000 followers on X. In November, he announced that he was going to do a 72-hour fundraising livestream: people could watch him using the brain implant in real time and donate so his family could build a new house that would meet his needs. He raised $750,000 over those three days, he tells me, but most of it came from the “crypto community” and will be subject to huge taxes when he tries to cash it out. He’s still trying to raise funds.
Noland dreams of being able to connect to a Tesla car and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. “It would give me the ability to have a 24-hour caregiver that I can control, to do anything for me, and I would be able to get around.”
You could start smoking again, I say.
“I could totally start smoking again. I could teach the Optimus robot how to roll cigarettes!”
“What the heck are you encouraging him to do? Jenny, you can leave now,” says Mia, laughing.
The reality of Noland’s future looks far more prosaic. When the study ends, Neuralink will either remove his implant or simply switch it off. Surely he will want an upgrade then?
“They can’t promise me anything,” he says. “Any sort of promises would incentivise me to stay in the study.” He’d like to go back to college to complete his degree, and then use his skills as a spokesperson to become an advocate for the growing BCI community. If anyone ever works out a way to restore movement to people with quadriplegia, Noland says it will probably be too late for him: his muscles have already atrophied so much.
“I’m content with my lot in life,” he says. “I was before Neuralink, and I will be again after. I’ll find a way.”
As I pack up my things, Noland tells me that he calls his chip Eve. He’s always liked that name. “Neuralink and I, we’re on the eve of something great, so that works out perfect, too. Also – Adam and Eve. God created Adam, and then gave Adam a helper, who is Eve. I’m Adam, in this scenario, and Eve is my helper. Together they cursed humanity. Maybe I will do the same, with Eve.”
He shoots me a bright grin. “I don’t think enough people enjoy that joke as much as I do.”
The Guardian, USA
