https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/mind-reading-may-help-those-who-cannot-speak/
2019jul31 cosmosmagazine.com 'Mind-reading' may help those who cannot speak NEWS BIOLOGY 31 JULY 2019 Decoding brain signals can make conversation possible. Mark Bruer reports. Researchers have decoded brain activity in a simple question-and-answer session. ANDRIY ONUFRIYENKO / GETTY IMAGES Scientists are a step closer to helping people who cannot speak to communicate by thought alone. For the first time, a research team has been able to decode brain activity in a simple question-and-answer session, recognising in real time both what a person hears and what they wish to say in response. Edward Chang and colleagues from the University of California San Francisco, US, say their work is an important step towards the development of a speech neuroprosthesis – a device to help people who can no longer speak because of illness or injury. ... Using high-density electrocorticography, the researchers first recorded activity in the brains of three patients as they listened to a series of questions and responded verbally with a full set of prepared answers. The question and answer sets were deliberately constrained in scope. For example, to the question “how is your room currently?” the valid answers were: bright, dark, cold, hot or fine. Having captured the neural signals associated with the questions and all valid answers, the researchers put the questions again, but this time allowed the patients to choose whichever answer they preferred from the valid options. By reading neural signals in the high gamma frequency range, the researchers were able to identify which question the patient was hearing 76% of the time. Once the question was identified, the researchers knew that only certain responses were possible, which made decoding the answer from cortical activity easier. The process produced an accurate translation of the answer 61% of the time, compared with a probability of just 7%. On Mon, 05 Aug 2019 10:45:14 +1000 David <dloch...@key.net.au> wrote: > On Sunday, 4 August 2019 11:40:47 AEST Karl Auer wrote: > >> I can't imagine thought commands being better fidelity. > > > > You know better than to use the argument from personal incredulity :-) > > I think Jan's right! > > Recently The Guardian ran a piece "Neuroscientists decode brain speech > signals into written text" - > https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/30/neuroscientists-decode-brain-speech-signals-into-actual-sentences > It's valuable research intended to make life easier for people with > impaired motor function. > > The subject was required to "speak" commands without actually verbalising > them, and the device picked up nerve signals from speech muscules (rather > than from a microphone) which were then converted to text. Presumably it > wouldn't work well, or at all, for people who are born profoundly deaf and > haven't fully developed their speech reflexes. > > This is a vastly different proposition to decoding thoughts. It's long been > assumed that brain activity for particular tasks occurs in specific areas of > the brain, but recent work suggests it's much more distributed. Even without > that complication, I think that identifying a concept from brain activity > before it's been verbalised is science-fiction stuff. > > David L > > _______________________________________________ > Link mailing list > Link@mailman.anu.edu.au > http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link -- Volunteer Work Only (but you can make money) MIT SE (UC), GradDip IT (UC), BSc (ANU), GradCert Rsch Methods & Des (UC) I am here for online friends, hobbies, volunteer work, and working on business ideas, preferably with females age 18+. Me: Computing Researcher, Self Employed, Innovation, Management, Canberra Australia. 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