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Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

Noland Arbaugh became P1 at Neuralink last year and it’s opened up a host of opportunities for him.

About a month before that town hall, Arbaugh, who’s 31, had undergone surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, about 2.5 hours from his home in Yuma, to get an experimental chip embedded into his brain that Neuralink had been working on and testing on animals for the past nine years. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Since Arbaugh became the first Neuralink patient in January 2024, there have been eight more individuals, including one woman, to enroll in the company’s ongoing clinical trials, which are now open in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and the United Arab Emirates.

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