Noland Arbaugh’s life changed in a split second in June 2016. He was 22 years old and working at a summer camp for children in upstate New York when he went swimming in a lake.
He can’t tell me exactly what happened, but he believes one of his friends accidentally struck him on the side of the head as they ran into the water and submerged themselves.
When Noland awoke face down in the water, unable to move or breathe, he realized he was paralyzed. But he did not panic. He claims to have felt no fear at all. “You never know what you’ll do in those high-pressure situations. That day, I discovered that I am difficult to shake. I am very calm under pressure.”
Elon Musk would eventually use this trait to his advantage when, after nearly eight years of being quadriplegic, Noland agreed to let the world’s richest man implant an electronic chip into his brain.
In January 2024, Noland became the first human to receive a brain-computer interface (BCI) developed by Musk’s company, Neuralink. If it worked, he’d be able to control a computer with only his mind.
Only four months after learning about Neuralink, Noland was on an operating table, with a purpose-built robot ready to insert the N1 chip into his motor cortex. 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 says from his wheelchair at his kitchen table in Yuma, Arizona.
However, the stakes for humanity were also high: if Neuralink succeeds, the world’s most powerful billionaire will have realized his science-fiction-fueled dream of combining minds and machines.
What kind of person would choose to be Elon Musk’s guinea pig? And after the experiment, what happens to Noland and the rest of us?
Noland lives in a different universe than Musk. He is now 30, and he still lives in the same simple, one-story house in the dusty military town in the Sonoran desert where he was raised. He left to pursue an international studies degree at Texas A&M University, only to return after his accident so that his mother, Mia, stepfather, and half-brother could care for him.
The kitchen wall has the words “Be grateful for small things, big things, and everything in between” stencilled on it. Goats, chickens, and a plump turkey named Hope roam the backyard. Two golden retrievers and a massive goldendoodle scamper around the kitchen, occasionally pressing their noses into my lap.
Noland has an electric wheelchair that he can control with a mouthpiece; his forearms remain stationary on the brightly upholstered armrests. Mia occasionally reaches forward to uncurl his fingers, offer him a sip of coffee through a straw in a Big Gulp cup, or swat away the flies that buzz around his face in the scorching Arizona heat.
He asks her to roll up his shirt so I can see a sleeve of tattoos on his arm. “I got it done after my accident because it didn’t hurt,” he says with a laugh. Two bracelets are inked on his wrist, a permanent replica of those given to him by the girls who pulled him out of the water in 2016.
Noland was an outdoor enthusiast and athlete prior to his accident, having played football, American football, basketball, rugby, and golf. He enjoyed hunting and shooting deer with his family. He was also musical, playing bass in a rock band and performing in high school theatre productions.
He loved Xbox and PlayStation, but he was never particularly interested in technology. A shelf next to us is still crammed with board games he used to play, including Settlers of Catan and The Game of Life.
Mia worked at their church, and Noland served as a student leader there. His faith was an important part of his life as he grew. “I always wanted to make it through college as a Christian,” he jokes. “That lasted roughly a week. I was sleeping around, using drugs, and drinking heavily.” He views his accident as divine intervention. “God was pulling me back. I honestly believe that it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
The blow to Noland’s head did not break his neck; rather, it dislocated it, and his vertebra immediately returned to its proper position; however, it severely injured his spinal cord. The severity of a serious spinal cord injury increases with its location.
Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman, broke his first and second vertebrae and was unable to support his head without assistance. Noland’s injury occurred between his fourth and fifth vertebrae, allowing him to move his head and shoulders and express himself through nods and shrugs, as he frequently does. He employs the term “luck” frequently.
“I was really lucky that I wasn’t ventilated for my entire life,” he jokes. “I was really lucky that I didn’t have a traumatic brain injury.”
Initially, there were “a lot of promising signs” that his condition would improve, but he never recovered much movement. At the start of his adult life, he was facing a lifetime of dependence.
“I have to rely on my family for everything: to give me a shower, to help with bowel movements and urination.” Noland smoked, and if he wanted a cigarette, he had to ask someone to take him outside, put one in his mouth, light it, and clean up the ash for him. He also enjoyed smoking weed (which is legal in Arizona).
“I did not like him smoking, but he is an adult. “It was hard,” Mia says. She looks over at him. “I’m your mother. Of course, I’ll add my two cents.
“I’m a grown man,” Noland says. “To have to rely on other people to do it – it really, really sucked.” He reluctantly quit a few years ago, unable to bear the guilt of exposing his caregivers to secondhand smoke.
“As a quadriplegic, it is difficult to text someone privately, which is something many people take for granted. “If I want to dictate something, it’s like yelling it out to the world…”
“‘I love you!'” Mia exclaimed.
“… I just didn’t have a way to build my life privately.”
It’s extraordinary, but also totally unremarkable: Noland is using a computer like anyone else; he’s just not moving his body: ‘I forget how impressive it is, because it’s so natural to me’
There was an iPad that Noland could use. “I’d have a stick in my mouth with a small piece of conductive fabric on the end, and I’d use it to touch and control my iPad. “I did that for years.” But it was frustrating. Others had to place him in the appropriate position.
Texting with the mouth stick was slow, and dictation required Noland to speak with the stick in his mouth. If it fell out, he would have to call for assistance. “It’s not that easy. And then there wasn’t much I could do about it. I mean, it is an iPad. You can’t do everything that a computer can.
He asks Mia to open his laptop in front of him on the kitchen table. He turns to face the screen.
“Implant connect,” he says.
And he starts playing chess, moving pieces across the board with quick cursor movements while his hands remain motionless on his wheelchair’s armrests. He’s been playing against some of the Neuralink engineers for a few months, he tells me as he grabs someone’s pawn. “None of them are very good, so it’s not too hard.”
Next, he’s browsing the internet, launching X, checking his DMs, and typing a message using a virtual keyboard. In the game Vampire Survivors, he is now slaying baddies by darting back and forth with a reaper’s scythe. “I love this game,” he says, looking over at me while keeping control of the cursor. He completes a level, and digital confetti rains down on the screen.
It’s both extraordinary and completely unremarkable: Noland is using a computer like anyone else; he’s just not moving his body at all. “Sometimes I forget how impressive it is, because it comes so naturally to me,” he says, shrugging again.
In some ways, Noland is more adept at using a computer than the rest of us. When he first got the Neuralink implant, he said all he wanted to do was play video games. He challenged his friends to the multiplayer version of Civilization VI, Red Death. “It is definitely a speed game, a speed test.
The person who arrives at the draw the quickest wins. “And I was beating them.” His eyes are large. “It blew my mind.” Just one small taste convinced me that this technology has the potential to change the world.”
There is nothing new about BCIs. The first experiments with chips and animal brains started in the late 1960s. The Utah Array, a square matrix of needles inserted 1.5mm into the brain, was developed in 1992 and is now considered the gold standard in human BCI design.
Two decades before Noland’s surgery, in 2004, a quadriplegic man named Matthew Nagle became the first to have a chip implanted inside his skull. While no regulator has yet approved the use of BCIs outside of an experimental setting, enough people have them to support an online forum called BCI Pioneers.
But Noland is the first to try out the chip created by an entrepreneur whose explicit goal is to find a way to feed information into the brain as well as receive it – a man who has proven 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 fueling riots across England last summer.
The theory behind BCIs is straightforward: they read electrical signals generated by neurons and convert them into computer commands. (A quadriplegic person’s brain cells continue to fire, but the signals are unable to travel down the spinal cord.) BCIs can connect to the brain via a wearable device, such as a cap, or by being surgically implanted into brain tissue. The closer the device gets to the brain cells, the more accurately the signals can be translated.
Neuralink’s N1 chip is wireless and designed to be smaller and more powerful than previous generations. (It’s approximately 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 advertisement for an Apple product, boasts of “1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair”. Neuralink’s R1 surgical robot inserts 64 threads “reliably and efficiently” 3.5mm into the cortex of the brain.
In his authorized biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson describes how the billionaire first considered implanting chips in brains in 2016, while driving with his chief of staff, Sam Teller, and becoming frustrated by how long it took him to type a message on his iPhone. “Imagine if you could think into the machine,” Musk responded, “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, including reusable rocket ships (SpaceX), electric cars and humanoid robots (Tesla), and hyperloops for mass transit in autonomous pods (The Boring Company).
Neuralink was inspired by Iain M Banks’ Culture series of novels, which Musk has praised. 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 has. “When I first read Banks, it struck me that this idea had a chance of protecting us on the artificial intelligence front,” Musk was quoted as saying.
“Everything you’ve ever experienced in your life – smell, emotions – are all electrical signals,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman in August. “If you activate the right neuron, you may detect a specific scent. You could definitely make things glow. The brain can be thought of as a biological computer. As a result, the brain could be manipulated – or hacked.
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Musk hopes that the enhanced human brain will be able to stay one step ahead of – or at least on par 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,” according to Isaacson. His first commercial goal was to assist people with quadriplegia.
Only one of the eight neuroscientists and engineers who co-founded Neuralink in 2016 is still on board. Former employees have complained about being under pressure to produce results within tight deadlines. However, those who stayed with the company were able to pull off the eye-catching stunts Musk was looking for.
Musk unveiled Gertrude the pig, who had been living with a Neuralink chip nestled under her skull for two months, during a livestream on YouTube in August 2020. He demonstrated how Gertrude’s movements were detected by the chip and wirelessly transmitted to a computer.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know,” Musk joked. “Maybe I do.” (In response to the demonstration, MIT Technology Review described Neuralink as “neuroscience theater”). Eight months later, Neuralink released a video of a macaque named Pager playing Pong with his mind. When he did well, he was rewarded with a sip of banana smoothie.
The company was quickly 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”. (When the US Department of Agriculture inspected the facilities in 2023, it found no violations of animal research rules.
In September 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Neuralink an investigational device exemption, allowing them to recruit participants for their first human trials. The Prime study by Neuralink aimed to show that the NI implant was “safe and useful in daily life”. All they needed was a suitable human being.
In the years that followed his accident, Noland did everything he could to improve his chances of regaining some of what he had lost. He added his name to North America’s largest database for spinal cord injury studies, but was never chosen to participate.
He believes 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 form new neural connections. Night after night, he’d lie in bed, eyes closed, trying to move. “You think, ‘Oh, I’m finally moving; I can feel myself moving!'” You open your eyes and look, but nothing happens. It’s very frustrating.”
Then, on September 19, 2023, a friend called him. “He is a huge Elon Musk fan. He knew everything about Neuralink. And when he saw that the human trials had opened up, he called me right away.”
At the time, Noland claims to have only known “what the average person knows” about Musk: “Tesla owner, SpaceX, Starlink, richest man in the world.” For years, he was a darling of the left, but after speaking out on a couple of issues, the left basically turned against him, and he began to lean toward the right.”
He knew nothing about Neuralink, but his opinion of Musk was clear: “He is one of the most impressive men to have lived in my lifetime.” People may not like him for a variety of reasons, but what he’s doing – pushing the boundaries of space travel, cars, and the internet – is incredible.”
On the first day of the trial, he was assisted by a friend in completing the online application. His first interview came just three days later, on a Friday. The following Monday, he had his second interview.
Determined to stand out, Noland took the first available slot for each interview, but he didn’t expect to be chosen. “Other quadriplegics get out and do things with their lives; I returned home after my accident and lived with my parents.” I thought they’d prefer someone more impressive.”
It’s clear to me that he is the ideal candidate: a warm, likable, earnest individual whose future was cut short by a twist of fate at the beginning of his adult life. From a public relations standpoint, he would be an excellent choice. But Noland doesn’t see it.
There were multiple rounds of interviews and assessments. Noland was transported to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight hours of scans, blood tests, urine tests, memory tests, and psychological assessments. The Neuralink team also spoke with Mia.
“They asked if we had any concerns, questions, doubts or anything,” according to her. “No one used to send me anything to read. I did not want to know every detail. I just wanted to be as supportive as possible.”
Noland agreed to participate in Neuralink’s Prime study for six years, signing a 35-page consent form that included a “laundry list” of risks. He received a call in early January 2024 informing him that he had been officially selected to be the first person to receive a Neuralink chip. His surgery would take two weeks.
Even though everything happened so quickly, Noland said he was prepared for anything. “I’m good at lying there and thinking about every possible scenario. I told my parents, ‘If I have a brain injury, I don’t want to live with you anymore; please put me in a home.’ I finished everything I needed to do. I was so at peace.”
“I got a little worried and nervous, because he’s already gone through so much,” Mia says, twisting her fists over her stomach. “But just looking at Noland makes you think, ‘He’s got this; he’s excited.'” That was very helpful.
Musk was supposed to arrive at the Barrow Neurological Institute on the morning of Noland’s surgery, on January 29, 2024. “I guess something happened with his plane – a malfunction or something – so he couldn’t make it,” Noland shares.
They talked on FaceTime just before he entered the theatre. “It lasted about a minute. Hey, I’m very excited. Thank you. This is such an awesome thing that you’re doing. “That’s what I was telling him,” he says, smiling. “He was like: ‘You’re gonna be making history,’ things like that.” Noland was unaffected by the fact that he was speaking with the world’s richest man. “He’s a regular guy – just much more impressive and a little bit more eccentric.”
You’re not thinking about doing it – you’re just willing the cursor to go wherever you want. When I first moved it with imagined movement, it blew my mind
The surgery lasted less than two hours. He shows me a photo on his phone of the large L-shaped incision on his shaved head. There’s nothing to see now: shaggy dark hair hides the scar. “They removed a piece of my skull, then replaced it with the chip. “My skin is over the top,” he says, allowing me to feel the spongy area on his scalp where there is no longer bone.
Musk arrived with his entourage while Noland was still groggy from the anaesthetic. He thanked Noland and informed him that the surgery had been a success. A little later, a 10-person Neuralink team arrived to activate the implant.
When they turned it on and saw that it was connected to a tablet that was receiving real-time data 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 entire room erupted into applause.
Next, Noland and the chip had to learn to collaborate: the human learning how to generate the best signals with his mind, and the computer learning how to correctly decode them. Noland continues to do four hours of “session” work for Neuralink each day, which includes exercises like clicking targets on a screen to fine-tune cursor control.
But it quickly became second nature for him. Initially, he used what he refers to as “attempted” movements: he would try to move his hand, and the cursor would move to where he wanted his hand to go. But then he was able to direct it with “imagined” movements, so he wasn’t trying to move anything other than the cursor itself.
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“You’re not thinking about doing it – you’re just willing the cursor to go wherever you want.” His eyes are large. “When I first moved it with imagined movement, it completely blew my mind. It was crazy. That was two weeks in, and I was ecstatic all day. That’s when everything became real to me.
I think it sounds like telekinesis. 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 for quadriplegics to be able to move things; rather, he wants minds to be able to interact seamlessly with computers.
However, Noland’s experience has been anything but smooth. At first, he was annoyed that he had to stop using the implant every five or six hours to charge it. But the Neuralink team was able to find a solution, and he can now use the N1 continuously, wearing a baseball cap with a coil that has been charged from the mains whenever the battery is low.
Then, one month after his surgery, the worst happened: the implant stopped working. He began to lose control over the cursor. It came to a head when he went to Fremont to visit Neuralink’s California facility and show off his new skills. Noland assumed the team had tinkered with the software.
“I said, ‘You guys need to fix this.'” I am here to play Mario Kart with Neuralink. “I can’t have you messing around with things right before I do that.”
Just before he arrived, the team informed him that the surgery had not taken into account how much his brain moved, pulsing with each heartbeat. The threads began retracting as soon as they were implanted; now, 85% of them were out of place, with their electrodes picking up nothing at all.
“It was very bad. I was having it all taken from me. Noland says, “That was really, really hard.”
“He cried,” Mia explains. We gave him time. “He did not want us around him.”
Noland nods. “I cried in my van right before we went over to Neuralink.”
He instructed the team to “do whatever they needed to do to fix it.” Go in and perform another surgery. But the neurosurgeon was hesitant to operate on him again, he claims. Instead, Neuralink engineers modified the software so that the remaining 15% of threads read groups of neuron signals rather than signals from individual cells. So far, it works.
Noland’s main source of frustration is his typing technique, which involves moving his cursor to click individual letters on a keyboard. It’s nowhere near the mind-to-screen text output Musk envisioned when he founded Neuralink. “We’ve gotten up to nearly 25 words per minute, but dictation still works better. We’ll see how that develops over time.
He understands 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 declined to meet or speak with Noland, had received an implant.
With his superior chip, “Alex” can create three-dimensional objects with his mind. None of his threads were retracted. Last month, Musk announced that a third, unnamed, person had received a Neuralink chip.
Is Noland envious of those who will follow him? “A little bit,” he admits. “I’m really excited for them though.”
Despite his unwavering optimism, Noland recognises the dark possibilities of the technology lodged in his brain. Neuralink claims it does not monitor his brain or track what he does online, but warns him that someone could “reverse engineer” the data produced by his neurons to determine what he has been looking at. “With that in mind, I keep it very PG,” he says.
On the day of the US presidential election, Noland tweeted the following 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 voluntarily.) Five days later, he asked his followers what the “biggest moral and ethical concerns” about a Neuralink implant might be.
“Kids might use it to cheat in school,” one said.
“Hacking them and taking over a user,” explained another.
“The ability for others to read your mind … and interfere with it,” explained a third person.
Why ask the question? “It’s something I get asked constantly, and I don’t have good answers.” But he’s obviously thought about it. When I ask him what a bad use for a BCI could be, he rattles off a list. “Mind control and body control.
At the moment, it only reads my signals, but it will be able to write at some point, and sending signals into the brain can be frightening. “You could make people see anything, feel different emotions, and have hallucinations…”
Musk is optimistic about a future in which Neuralink transmits signals to the brain. He discussed the possibilities with Isaacson. “Want to see infrared and ultraviolet? “What about radio waves or radar?”
In a 2022 presentation, Musk described how Neuralink’s ability to write on the brain would enable someone born blind to see. He also stated that he was “confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to somebody who has a severed spinal cord” by implanting chips below the site of injury.
Noland dreams of being able to connect to a Tesla car and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. ‘It would mean I could have a 24-hour caregiver that I can control, and be able to get around’
So far, the billionaire’s extraordinary ambitions have largely gone unchecked. Neuralink has not registered its human trials with the publicly accessible database ClinicalTrials.gov, and it has disclosed very few details about its research.
Medical ethicists refer to Neuralink as “science by press release” due to its lack of external scrutiny. Musk’s impatience for dramatic results is likely to grow now that Neuralink faces stiff competition from other startups in the United States and China, where companies are focusing on non-therapeutic BCIs that could improve cognition in the general population.
Musk stated in August that hundreds of millions of people would receive Neuralink implants over 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 advised. Depending on your perspective, this is either the pinnacle of wearable technology or a dystopian Black Mirror world. “I might get it …” Joe Rogan, a podcaster from the United States, commented last year. “I don’t want to be the only person who can’t read minds.”
It could all be hype and bluster. However, one can imagine a future in which anyone with a brain implant has access to the entirety of human knowledge.
They could turn off their anxiety (or empathy) as needed. With complete recall of every moment in their lives and every piece of information they ever encountered, as well as the ability to solve problems before the conscious mind could consider them, life for these people would be relatively frictionless. In that world, wouldn’t there be a significant disparity between those who had BCIs and those who did not?
“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 bring it up. “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.”
According to FDA regulations, Neuralink cannot compensate Noland for his participation in the research or contribute to his medical expenses. His house is not fully accessible; for the past eight years, he has been showering in his backyard. “There is no privacy.” But we didn’t have enough money to build a shower for me. That’s what we’ve always wanted.”
Since becoming the human face of Neuralink, Noland has over 128,000 followers on X. In November, he announced that he would host a 72-hour fundraising livestream in which people could watch him use the brain implant in real time and donate to help his family build a new house that would meet his needs.
He raised $750,000 in those three days, he says, but the majority of it came from the “crypto community” and will be subject to high taxes when he tries to cash it out. He is still trying to raise funds.
Noland hopes to be able to connect to a Tesla vehicle and the company’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.”
I suggest you start smoking again.
“I could definitely start smoking again.” “I could show the Optimus robot how to roll cigarettes.”
“What exactly are you encouraging him to do? Jenny, you can go now,” Mia says, laughing.
Noland’s future appears to be far more prosaic. When the study concludes, Neuralink will either remove his implant or turn it off. Surely he’ll want to upgrade then?
“They can’t promise me anything,” he says. “Any sort of promises would incentivise me to stay in the study.” He wants to return to college to finish his degree, and then use his experience as a spokesperson to advocate for the growing BCI community.
If anyone ever discovers a way to restore movement to people with quadriplegia, Noland believes it will be too late for him because his muscles have already atrophied significantly.
“I’m content with my lot in life,” he tells me. “I was before Neuralink and will be again after. “I will find a way.”
As I pack my belongings, Noland informs me that he calls his chip Eve. He’s always liked the name. “Neuralink and I are on the verge of something great, so that works out perfectly, too. Also, Adam and Eve. God created Adam and then gave him a helper, Eve. In this scenario, I’m Adam, and Eve is my helper. Together, they cursed humanity. Maybe I’ll do the same with Eve.
He gives me a bright grin. “I don’t think enough people enjoy that joke as much as I do.”
