A quadriplegic Arizona chess player made history last week when he became the first person in the world to move a pawn only with his mind during the Speed Chess Championship in Paris. The spectacle was made possible by a brain chip created by Neuralink, a brain-computer interface (BCI) company founded in 2016 by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Noland Arbaugh, 30, was in a 2016 freak swimming accident that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He opted to undergo a Neuralink clinical trial in 2022 and became the first person in the world to receive the Musk-created brain chip earlier this year.

Neuralink, he said, has given him a newfound outlook on life after losing control of his limbs.

"It's made me a lot more independent," Arbaugh told The Telegraph. "I feel like I'm capable of going back to school and getting a job, which are things that I couldn't even imagine doing before Neuralink. I feel I'm just as capable as everyone else."
 

He first learned of Neuralink's clinical trial through a friend who called him and asked: "Do you want to get a chip in your brain?"

"I said, 'Sure, why not?' Kind of jokingly, we applied and everything worked out," Arbaugh explained.

The chip is implanted in the motor cortex on the left side of his brain, where it regulates the movement of his right hand. It consists of 64 "threads" and 16 electrodes. This allows him to manipulate a cursor on a screen or his fingers in a specific direction by thinking about it.

"There's lots of machine learning involved," Arbaugh said. "I try something, the implant learns it, and over time, it just gets better and better."

Arbaugh stated that he met Elon Musk via FaceTime on the day of his surgery and has high expectations for the new technology.