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Here is the research setup: A woman speaks Dutch into a microphone while 11 small needles made of platinum and iridium record her brain waves.
The 20-year-old volunteer has epilepsy, and his doctors inserted these 2-millimeter-long pieces of metal — each lined with 18 electrodes — into the front and left side of his brain to find his point of origin. convulsions. But this neural micro-acupuncture is also lucky for a group of researchers because the electrodes are in contact with the parts of their brain that are responsible for the production and articulation of oral words.
That’s a nice part. After the woman speaks (this is called “obvious speech”), and after a computer connects the sounds to brain activity, the researchers ask her to do it again. This time he almost whispers, imitating words with his mouth, tongue and jaw. That’s “intentional speech.” And then he does everything again, but without moving at all. The researchers just asked him imagine saying the words.
It was a version of what people were talking about, but in reverse. In real life, we formulate silent ideas in one part of our brain, another part turns them into words, and then others control the movement of the mouth, tongue, lips, and larynx, creating audible sounds at the right frequencies for speech. . Here, computers allow the woman’s mind to jump the queue. They recorded when he was thinking — the technical term is “figurative speech” —and were able to reproduce a sound signal formed from interpolated signals coming from his brain in real time. Sounds were not understood as words. This work, published in late September, is still relatively preliminary. But the fact that it has happened at the millisecond speed of thought and action shows an astonishing progress towards the emerging use of computer interfaces in the brain: giving voice to people who do not speak.
This disability, from a neurological disorder or brain injury, is called “anarthria”. It’s weak and scary, but it has some ways to deal with people. Instead of direct speech, people with anarthria may use devices that translate the movement of other body parts into letters or words; a gesture will also serve. Recently, a brain-computer interface installed in the cortex of a person with blocked syndrome allowed them to translate the images. handwriting in a 90-character output per minute. Good but not great; A typical oral conversation in English is a pretty staggering 150 words per minute.
The problem is such moving one arm (or cursor), the formulation and production of speech is very difficult. It depends on the feedback, a 50 millisecond loop when we say something and hear ourselves say it. This allows people to perform quality control in real time on their speech. Things like this are what allow humans to learn to speak in the first place: listening to language, producing sounds, hearing ourselves produce those sounds (through the ear and auditory cortex, another part of the brain) and comparing what we are. with what we are trying to do.
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