It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but Neuralink is already showing progress in doing similar work with other animals, like pigs. The monkey in the video is called Pager, and he’s a rhesus macaque. Pager has two of Neuralink’s special “Link” devices inside his brain. The devices were planted in Pager’s brain by a surgeon and used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, Musk said. Scientists taught Pager to play a video game. They used a banana smoothie as a special treat to reward him when he played the game correctly. Soon Pager was eager to play well in order to get more smoothie.

At first, 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. Neuralink’s 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. 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.