Scientists are getting closer to making telepathy a reality. In a new study published this week, researchers claim to have created a device that can read and translate a person’s internal speech. However, research results have so far shown only limited success, and many obstacles remain before such devices can find practical applications.
In recent years, scientists Advanced technology It can read and interpret complex brain signals, allowing us to converse with another person – a technology that allows people with speech impairments to regain a degree of communication. So far, much of this work has involved translating parts of a person’s vocalizations or imitated speech into text or audio. But Caltech scientists appear to have broken new ground in this emerging field, creating a brain-computer interface (BMI) device that can translate internal speech, at least at a rudimentary level.
The researchers recruited two people with spinal cord injuries to participate in their study. Both had electrodes implanted in the supramarginal gyrus, a brain region that previous research has shown is important for the formation of internal speech.
Over three days, volunteers were trained to imagine saying a series of six single words (battlefield, cowboy, boa constrictor, spoon, swim and phone) and two nonsense terms (nifzig and bindip) while their brains were monitored . The initial measurements were then fed into a computer model, which attempted to decode and interpret the brain signals as the volunteers considered saying the words during subsequent sessions that took place in real time.
As hoped, the researchers did find that when volunteers internalized their own words, there was unique brain activity in the supramarginal gyrus compared to vocalizations, supporting the supramarginal gyrus’ importance in this process. role perspective. Overall, their model was 79% accurate at predicting the first subject’s internal speech and 23% accurate at predicting the second subject’s speech.
“This work represents a proof-of-concept for a high-performance intra-speech BMI,” the authors wrote in the paper. publish Monday in Nature Medicine.
Clearly, this study is just an early example of the technology’s potential. Considering the huge differences between the two volunteers, it’s clear that scientists have a lot more to learn about how our brains produce internal speech. We are still a long way from using these BMI devices to effectively translate the thoughts of people without external communication skills, such as those with autism. locked-in syndromewhich will be an especially profound application for these people and their loved ones.
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Beyond medical uses, learning how to decipher the brain signals that underline internal speech and thought may lead to more radical possibilities in the future.Other researchers have Created interface For example, it could allow people’s brains to communicate with each other at a distance. So combining these different types of brain-computer technology could one day make a kind of mind-reading possible.
Still, the findings do mark an important step forward, and researchers are already working on further improvements. Next, they hope to see if their technology can reliably distinguish between individual letters of the alphabet.
“We might be able to have an internal phonetic speller that would actually help patients spell single words,” said study co-author Sarah Wandelt. Tell Natural News.
