A company called Neuralink has shared a video which shows a monkey playing a Video game. That's fairly unusual, but what makes the video even stranger is that the monkey is playing the video game with just its mind.
Neuralink owned by Elon Musk is working to develop devices (设备) that could allow People to control things using just their brains. It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but it is already showing progress in doing similar work with other animals.
The monkey is called Pager, who has two of Neuralink's special "Link" devices inside his brain, planted by a surgeon. These devices are connected to 2,048 wires which lead to the parts of Pager's brain that control movements of the arms and hands. In the experiment, scientists taught Pager to play a video game.
Firstly, Pager controlled the video game using a joystick, which is a normal gaming controller. But as Pager played, his Link devices wirelessly sent out information about the signals his brain was using to control his arms and hands. Scientists recorded all of these signals.
Then they used computers to match up the signals from Pager's brain to the movements that his hands were actually doing. This was challenging work and the scientists counted on AI to help them decode (解码) Pager's brain signals.
The final step was to have a computer make moves in the video game as if Pager had actually moved the joystick. If Pager thought about moving the joystick up, the computer would send an "up" signal to the video game.
Even though Neuralink's work now focuses on animals and video games, there's a very serious purpose behind it. Neuralink wants to make it possible for humans who have lost the ability to control their bodies to communicate vit the world. Mr. Musk says that in the near future Neauralink hopes to allow a paralyzed (瘫痪的) person to control a smartphone just by thinking, He believes they'll be able to de it faster than those who are using their hands.
