Thought – recording device underway

A mind-reaching machine that can translate thoughts into speech is coming closer to reality. The research has been on-going for several years, and recently, scientists successfully managed to playback a word that someone is thinking by monitoring their brain activity. While there remains a long way to go, they say this could help victims of […]

A mind-reaching machine that can translate thoughts into speech is coming closer to reality.
The research has been on-going for several years, and recently, scientists successfully managed to playback a word that someone is thinking by monitoring their brain activity.
While there remains a long way to go, they say this could help victims of stroke and others with speech paralysis to communicate with their loved ones.
How they did it Using electrodes placed on the surface of the language areas of the brain of awake patients, scientists monitored the pattern of electrical responses of brain cells during perceived speech.
The scientists then created a computer model that could match spoken sounds to these signals.
The researchers took a clever approach to overcome some important limitations.
For example, they accounted for the natural differences in sound timing when one is producing the same word twice, such as when thinking of the word then by uttering it.
Remarkably, the team was then able to decode speech when a person thinks of a specific word, from direct brain recordings.
Professor Robert Knight and his team at UC Berkeley have been studying how hearing words, speaking out loud and imagining words involves brain areas that overlap.
“Now, the challenge is to reproduce comprehensible speech from direct brain recordings done while a person imagines a word they would like to say,” said Knight, who is also the Founding Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Knight says the goal of the device is to help people affected by motor disease such as paralysis and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.