Keeping your thoughts strictly to yourself may soon prove infeasible, with scientists working on a break-through, mind-reading device. The idea is to help people who are physically unable to interact with the outside world.
In fact, it's all about hearing "inner voices" and correctly
interpreting them with the help of unique individual decoders, a
researcher from the University of California, Berkley, explained.
"If you're reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a
voice in your own head. We're trying to decode the brain activity
related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can
allow someone who is paralyzed or locked in to speak," Brian
Pasley told New Scientist magazine.
READ MORE: Pentagon's DARPA works on reading brains in real time
The team of researchers recorded brain activity in seven people
undergoing epilepsy surgery, while they looked at a screen
displaying texts from either one of the best-known speeches in US
history: the Gettysburg Address by President Abraham Lincoln, or
John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.
Each volunteer taking part in the experiment was asked to read
their chosen text both aloud and silently. The challenge was to
figure out which neurons reacted to specific aspects of speech in
order to create a personalized decoder to turn this information
into a visual representation.
Read more: Scientists work on backing up human brain with computers
Although the decoder was able to successfully reconstruct which
words several of the volunteers were thinking, "it's not good
enough yet to build a device," Stephanie Martin, who worked
on the study with Pasley, told the magazine.
The researchers are currently sharpening the algorithms,
scrutinizing the nuts and bolts of neural activity, especially
the area concerned with speaking rate and different
pronunciations of the same word.
Read more: Mind reading: Scientists reconstruct letters from brain scan data
The team is also trying to guess what a person is listening to by
playing Pink Floyd songs to volunteers. "Sound is
sound," Pasley wrapped up. "It all helps us understand
different aspects of how the brain processes it."
In their previous study, when neuroscientists were hoping to
produce sound from thoughts, they recorded brain activity in
people who already had electrodes in their brain to treat
epilepsy. They discovered that certain neurons in the brain's
temporal lobe only responded actively to particular aspects of
sound.
In 2011, Hollywood epics, such as Madagascar 2, Pink Panther 2
and Star Trek, helped researchers from UC Berkeley monitor the
blood flow in human brain with MRI scanners, and eventually
recreate images similar to those being screened.