Neuralink Monkey

About

Neuralink Monkey refers to the subject of a viral video showcasing Elon Musk's Neuralink hardware, a brain implant that scans the monkey’s brain and allows it to play Pong on a computer screen handsfree. The video itself shows a monkey able to move a cursor around on a screen using its Neuralink, being rewarded with some banana smoothie for correct play. In memes, this is often used one of two ways: either by taking the template image and photoshopping what the monkey is watching or by taking the template video and making it seem as though the monkey is performing a different action on the screen. While similar to Neuron Activation Monkey, the two memes are not related despite being somewhat associated.

Origin

On April 8th, 2021, the YouTube^[1] channel for Neuralink uploaded the video titled “Monkey MindPong.” This video would go on to secure 5.2 million views, 66,000 likes and 10,000 comments in five days (shown below).

A still image from the video, which would later become the template for the meme, was shared on Neuralink’s Twitter^[2] page that same day, amassing 12,300 retweets, 5,100 thousand quote tweets and 50,000 likes in five days. The first usage of Neuralink Monkey as a meme came in a reply to a tweet from Elon Musk, where Twitter^[6] user @Pollo2x posted a photoshopped version of the meme showing the monkey looking at something other than Pong on the screen, receiving five retweets and 261 likes in four days (shown below).

Spread

A day after the video was uploaded to Neuralink’s channel, the clip was reposted on various channels for news outlets, such as CNET^[3] and Reuters.^[4] A short version of the video was posted to Twitter by user Lauren Row on April 8th, 2021, receiving 1.3 million views, 155 likes and 47 retweets in five days. On April 9th, Twitter^[7] user @LstManStanding_ posted a version of the video where it was edited to make the monkey appear to play Call of Duty (shown below).

The trend of posting the still picture as a meme continued with the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit^[5] receiving a post made by Redditor sprdistan on April 10th, showing the monkey watching the Belle Delphine inflatable dolphin pool stream, which received 8,388 upvotes and 124 comments in three days (shown below).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References