CAN BRAIN-MACHINE INTERFACE BE DEVELOPED?

Can someday we would be able to listen to the thoughts of the people who cannot speak ?

Earlier looking at the electrical activity of the brain on the map the scientists were able to say to which words a person was hearing but the present gist of the scientists is toward being able to "hear" the thoughts of people who can’t speak.Scientists have been trying to understand the mechanism of our brain by which it manages to processes the audible sounds and extracts the abstract meanings of the words and sentences conveyed to it.   

 Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says, "If someone was completely paralyzed, or if a patient had locked-in syndrome with no movement, but the brain was still active and we could understand it well enough, we could develop devices to take advantage of that and restore communication." 

To see how those findings might be applicable in people, Pasley and colleagues enlisted the help of 15 patients with epilepsy or brain tumors who had 256 electrodes attached to the surface of their brains through a cutting in the skull in order to map out the source of their seizures. With electrodes in place, participants listened to about 50 different speech sounds in the form of sentences and words, both real and fake, such as "jazz," "peace," "Waldo," "fook" and "nim."

After mapping out the brain's electrical responses from the temporal lobe of the seizure patients to each sound using two different computational models, the research team found that they could predict which of two sounds from the study set the brain was responding to, and they could do it with about 90 percent accuracy.Researcher Dr, Brian Pasley compared this technique to a pianist 'hearing' the music a colleague is playing in a sound-proof room simply by looking how the piano works.Wolpaw said that this discovery could be relevant to those misfortunates who cannot speak like the comatose and the brain-damaged patients to communicate artificially.

Still there is a long way to go before this technique comes into practical use. This new discovery looked at just a minimal numbers of words of English language and many more words are likely to produce similar electrical activity in the human brains. The study also explored only how human brains respond on hearing the sounds and farther study is required for the scientists to acknowledge themselves whether human brains produce same pattern of electrical waves when they try to say or imagine something.

This work of scientists represents an incremental step that will likely lead to many more. Like devices that allow people to use their thoughts to move robotic arms, there might some day be brain-machine interfaces that give speech to people who have lost it.

[Source : DiscoveryNews]

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