It has always been discussed that how convenient it would have been if somebody could just read one’s mind or how clearer things would be if, by some magical intervention, people could read the minds of another. Well, scientists and researchers were paying attention when this was being humored and they have devised a close situation. Their recent developments may lead to humans enunciating their thoughts by just thinking and relaying them to the person in front.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco Campus have been working on innovation for a decade now and have finally achieved what they were set to do since the beginning. They have developed a brain implant that can read thoughts by tracking and decoding neural activity. This specifically works in the areas of the brain associated with voice.
This is a massive breakthrough for people who have impaired or no speech. Also, patients who have lost their ability to speak or are paralyzed will now be able to communicate without forcing themselves to interact or give signals or move cursors for every alphabet of the words they wish to speak. The trial was successfully run on a 30-year-old man who could speak 50 words by just thinking about uttering them. He outlived a stroke 15 years ago and could only communicate by typing words on a screen.
The details of this experiment and trial along with the technology are published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The person has to undergo surgery and an array of electrodes is incorporated into the brain. They detect the patterns of neural activities generated when the person is thinking of speaking some words. The system already has the patterns of these activities decoded and when the neural messages match, the system generates a visual worded text of the person’s thoughts. It gives out 18 words in one minute with an accuracy of 75 percent. This is just the first step towards the future of thought to speech technology.
