In May, Noland Arbaugh became the first recipient of a Neuralink brain-computer interface. The 29-year-old had suffered a spinal injury while swimming – an accident that left him paralysed from the neck down. For the last eight years he had been using a wheelchair and a stick held in his mouth to handle electronic devices. But now there’s another way. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, can translate intended movement signals in the brain into computer commands.