Nolan Arbaugh
speaker
265 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Nolan Arbaugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I was wiggling kind of all of my fingers to see if anything would happen. There was a lot of other things going on, but that big yellow spike was the one that stood out to me. I'm sure that if I would have stared at it long enough, I could have mapped out maybe 100 different things, but the big yellow spike was the one that I noticed.
Pretty easy for me. It's something that At the very beginning after my accident, they told me to try and move my body as much as possible even if you can't, just keep trying because that's going to create new neural pathways or pathways in my spinal cord to reconnect these things to hopefully regain some movement someday.
Yeah, I know. It's bizarre.
Yep.
It starts reconnecting. And that's about it. I can, if I try enough, I can wiggle some of my fingers, not like on command. It's more like if I try to move, say my right pinky and I just keep trying to move it after a few seconds, it'll wiggle. So I know there's stuff there. Like I know like, and that happens with, you know, a few different of my fingers and stuff.
Um, but yeah, that's, that's what they tell you to do. Um, one of the people at the time when I was in the hospital came in and told me for one guy who had recovered, um, most of his control, what he thought about every day was actually walking like the act of walking, um, just over and over again. So I tried that for years. I try just imagining walking, which is, it's hard. It's hard to
imagine like all of the steps that go into well taking a step like all of the things that have to move like all the activations that have to happen along your leg in order for one step to occur but you're not just imagining you're like doing it right i'm trying yeah so it's like it's imagining over again what I had to do to take a step. Because it's not something any of us think about.
You want to walk and you take a step. You don't think about all of the different things that are going on in your body. So I had to recreate that in my head as much as I could. And then I practice it over and over and over.
Yeah. Which, which was hard. It was hard at the beginning.
Like which way? It was both. Um, There's a scene in one of the Kill Bill movies, actually, oddly enough, where she is paralyzed, I don't know, from a drug that was in her system. And then she finds some way to get into the back of a truck or something, and she stares at her toe, and she says, move, move your big toe. And after a few seconds on screen, she does it.
And she did that with every one of her body parts until she could move again. I did that for years. Just stared at my body and said, move your index finger, move your big toe. Sometimes vocalizing it out loud, sometimes just thinking it. I tried every different way to do this to try to get some movement back. And it's hard because it actually is...
like taxing, like physically taxing on my body, which is something I would have never expected because it's not like I'm moving, but it feels like there's a buildup of, I don't know, the only way I can describe it is They're like signals that aren't getting through from my brain down because there's that gap in my spinal cord. So brain down and then from my hand back up to the brain.
And so it feels like those signals get stuck in whatever body part that I'm trying to move and they just build up and build up and build up until they burst. And then once they burst, I get like this really weird sensation of everything sort of like dissipating back out to level. And then I do it again.
It's also just like a fatigue thing, like a muscle fatigue, but without actually moving your muscles. It's very, very bizarre. And then if you try to stare at a body part or think about a body part and move for two, three, four, sometimes eight hours, it's very taxing on your mind. It takes a lot of focus. It was a lot easier at the beginning because I wasn't able to
like control a tv in my room or anything i wasn't able to um control any of my environment so for the first few years a lot of what i was doing was staring at walls and so um obviously i did a lot of thinking and i tried to move a lot just over and over and over again do you never give up sort of hope there no training hard essentially yep and i still do it i do it
like subconsciously and i think that uh that helped a lot with things with neuralink honestly it's something that i talked about the other day at the all hands that i did at neuralink's austin facility welcome to austin by the way yeah hey thanks man i i went to school hey thanks thanks man the the gigafactory was super cool i went to school at texas a&m so i've been around before um so you should be saying welcome to me yeah welcome to texas yeah i get you
Um, but yeah, I was talking about how a lot of what they've had me do, especially at the beginning, um, well, I still do it now, um, is body mapping. So like there will be a visualization of a hand or an arm on the screen and I have to do that motion and that's how they sort of train, um, the algorithm to like understand what I'm trying to do. And so it made things very seamless for me, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if other quadriplegics, like other paralyzed people, give up. I hope they don't. I hope they keep trying because I've heard other paralyzed people say, like, don't ever stop. They tell you two years, but you just never know. The human body's capable of amazing things. So, I've heard other people say, don't give up.
I think one girl had spoken to me through some family members and said that she had been paralyzed for 18 years and she'd been trying to wiggle her index finger for all that time and she finally got it back 18 years later. So like I know that it's possible and I'll never give up doing it. I just I do it when I'm lying down like watching TV.
I'll find myself doing it kind of just almost like on its own. It's just something I've gotten so used to doing that. I don't know. I don't think I'll ever stop.
Showing 61–80 of 265 · page 4 of 14
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