Scientists are inching closer to realizing telepathy. In a new study published this week, researchers claim to have developed a device that can read and translate people's inner conversations. But the discovery has so far shown only modest success, and many hurdles remain before such devices can be put into practical use.
In recent years, scientists have advanced technology This is a technology that allows people to read and interpret complex brain signals and have conversations with others, and it is a technology that has enabled people with language disorders to regain some ability to communicate. Much of this research to date has involved translating a person's partially vocalized or imitated speech into words or sounds. But scientists at the California Institute of Technology appear to have broken new ground in this emerging field by developing a brain-machine 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 the study. Both had electrodes implanted in the supramarginal gyrus, a brain region that previous research has suggested is important for the formation of internal language.
Over three days, volunteers were trained to imagine saying a series of six words (battlefield, cowboy, python, spoon, swim, telephone) and two gibberish terms (niffzig and bindip) while their brains were monitored. received. The initial measurements were then fed into a computer model that attempted to decipher and interpret the brain signals as the volunteers thought about saying these words in real time during subsequent sessions.
As expected, the researchers found unique brain activity in the supramarginal gyrus when volunteers were internalizing language compared to vocalization, suggesting that the supramarginal gyrus plays a key role in the process. This confirmed the idea that it was fulfilling its purpose. Overall, their model had 79% accuracy in predicting the first subject's internal speech and 23% accuracy in predicting the second subject's speech.
“This study represents a proof of concept for a high-performance internal voice BMI,” the authors wrote in their paper. published Monday is natural medicine.
Clearly, this study is just an early example of the potential of this technology. Considering the results between the two volunteers were so different, it's also clear that scientists have a lot more to learn about how our brains work to produce internal speech. . And we are probably a long way from being able to use these his BMI devices to efficiently translate the thoughts of people without external communication skills. locked-in syndromeThis will be of particular profound application to these individuals and their loved ones.
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Apart from medical applications, learning how to decipher brain signals that highlight internal conversations and thoughts could lead to more fundamental possibilities in the future. Other researchers Created interface For example, people's brains will be able to communicate with each other from a distance. Therefore, by combining these different types of brain machine technology, mind reading may someday become a reality.
Still, these findings represent an important step forward, and researchers are already working on further improvements. They next want to find out whether their technology can reliably distinguish between individual letters of the alphabet.
“We might be able to have a phonetic speller in the body, which would really help patients spell words,” said study co-author Sarah Wandert. Said Nature News.
