Noland Arbaugh
The first human being to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain-computer implant, surgically placed in January 2024 at the Barrow Neurological Institute. Paralysed from the shoulders down after a 2016 diving accident, he volunteered for Neuralink’s first human trial and has since become the company’s most public patient advocate, giving continuous feedback that has shaped the device’s software and setting the company’s internal performance records along the way.
Core positions
Arbaugh draws a distinction, grounded in his own experience learning to use the device, between ‘attempted movement’ — physically trying to move a limb even though nothing visibly happens — and ‘imagined movement’ without any attempt, which never gave him the same reliable control. His most significant personal breakthrough came when he stopped attempting any hand movement at all and found the cursor responding to a more abstract, direct intention to move it — an experience he compares to a Nobel laureate’s ‘aha moment’.
About a month after his surgery, several of his implant’s threads retracted and his cursor control degraded; he describes choosing not to let the news define a scheduled day and resolving that, even without regained control, he would keep contributing data to help whoever came after him — a resolve that predated the software fix that ultimately restored and then exceeded his prior performance. His faith, framed through the biblical story of Job, and his family and friends are what he credits with sustaining him through the accident’s aftermath. Beyond the technology itself, he locates his hope in the people building it — a team, in his words, that ‘moves mountains’ for him.
In the wiki
- Elon Musk and the Neuralink Team on Brain-Computer Interfaces, the N1 Implant, and the First Patient — his full account of the accident, the surgery, learning to control a cursor, the thread-retraction setback, and what the device has meant to him
- Brain-Computer Interface — concept; the lived, patient-side account of the mechanism