The man whose brain chip was implanted by Musk shows how he is doing 18 months later: "It shouldn't be possible..."

It was in January 2024 when Elon Musk's neuroscience company, Nueralink, successfully implanted a microchip in Noland Arbaugh's brain, making him the company's first patient.

After more than eight years of paralysis due to a 2016 car accident, Arbaugh shared his experience in an interview with Fortune, explaining how the Neuralink microchip has changed his life and returned aspects of it he thought he had lost forever.

While Neuralink isn't the first company to achieve this, the fact that Elon Musk's name is behind it certainly makes it even more striking. However, the patient explains that he didn't do it for Musk or for himself, but for science and its development . "I never doubted for a second that it would work," says Arbaugh, who personally didn't have strong opinions about Elon Musk one way or the other.

After the accident that left him paralyzed, Arbaugh believed he would never be able to study, work, or play video games again. "You just have no control, no privacy, and it's hard," the patient explained. "You have to learn that you have to depend on other people for everything."

"If all went well, I could help by being a Neuralink participant," he said. "If something terrible happened, I knew they would learn from it."

However, thanks to the Neuralink chip, this man has regained some control of his life by being able to control a computer with the microchip. When he woke up from the surgery to install the device, he said he was initially able to control a cursor on a screen by thinking about moving his fingers.

"Honestly, at first I didn't even know what to expect." Over time, his ability to use the implant has increased to the point where he can now play chess and video games.

"I'm so busy all the time," he says. "It's so different from what life was like before... I feel like I'm playing catch-up for eight years, doing nothing : lying there, staring at the walls." Since Arbaugh became the first patient, the company has already implanted the technology in eight other patients.

The truth is that experts, despite the great advantages that this technology offers, see a negative side to all this, and as Anil Seth, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, points out, "the main problem is privacy . Once you allow access to our brain activity, we are allowing access not only to what we do, but potentially to what we think, what we believe and what we feel."

But this isn't something that worries Arbaugh, and in fact, he wants to see the technology go further, explaining that he would love to see, for example , the chip developed to control wheelchairs . This technology demonstrates that development is very important, and that we can reach places previously thought impossible. Even so, there's still a long way to go, but these first steps in the sector are very promising.