The Buddha spoke of the "monkey mind," the hyperactive, incessantly chattering brain which must be tamed to achieve inner peace. 2500 years later, Elon Musk is also trying to overcome the monkey mind, not on the road to nirvana but on a virtual ping-pong table. Musk, the founder of numerous tech companies including PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, is neck-and-neck with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for the title of richest person on earth. With close to $200 billion at his disposal, Musk can afford to explore anything that piques his interest. So after building revolutionary electric cars and rocket ships, what does this real-life Tony Stark do next to advance the role of technology in our lives? The answer is Neuralink, a highly secretive San Francisco company working to physically integrate computers in brains, with the stated goal of helping those afflicted by paralysis. While this sounds like science fiction, it is building on fact. In 2006, a paralyzed man named Matt Nagle volunteered to have scientists wire his brain to a computer. In time, he learned to operate the mouse with his mind, even playing the classic 1970s Atari game "Pong." Sadly, Nagle passed away in 2007. The process involves the insertion of tiny, flexible wires into the brain, which gradually may replace the type of external physical device like the one you are reading right now. Since there are all kinds of pesky laws about using human subjects in experiments, Neuralink has been testing its interface on mice and pigs, who have only PETA to speak on their behalf. Now, Musk announces, trials have begun on monkeys, inching ever closer to testing on the brains of other primates such as Homo sapiens. "One of the things we're trying to figure out is whether we can have the monkeys playing mind pong with each other," reports Musk. "That would be pretty cool." Musk assured PETA and other animal rights groups that nothing too evil was going on. "You can't see where the implant is and he's a happy monkey," he said, further boasting that the US Department of Agriculture called the Neuralink lab "the nicest monkey facility" they had ever been briskly ushered through. While no one outside of Neuralink really knows what is going on behind closed doors, it is clear that "mind pong" is a key component of the emerging field of implantable brain–machine interfaces. While the pioneering human volunteer Matt Nagle got to test the beta version of "Pong," a new generation of VR table tennis games will further blur the vanishing distinction between technology and reality. Just don't lose your Zen when a monkey mind gets the best of you. He's been practicing.

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