American biologists have created a neurochip capable of reading signals from the hearing center of the brain in real time and deciphering what its owner hears or says. This technology will return the power of speech to paralyzed and dumb people, scientists write in the journal Nature Communications.
In the past 10 years, neurophysiologists have managed to make a real breakthrough in the field of creating neurointerfaces - a set of microchips, special electrodes and computer programs that allow connecting cyber limbs, artificial eyes and even those sense organs that have no analogues in nature - thermal imagers and X-ray imagers.
For example, in March 2013, Brazilian and American scientists were able to combine the brains of two rats living thousands of kilometers from each other, into a kind of "local network", or, as the scientists themselves called this construction, "organic computer", and teach them to exchange information.
They later created a similar "collective mind" by combining the brains of three monkeys, and two years ago, other researchers were able to replace the damaged part of the hippocampus, the memory center in the brains of mice, and rid them of the "marmot syndrome", the inability to remember new information.
Such successes, as Chartier notes, made many scientists think about whether it is possible to directly read thoughts from the centers of speech of the brain and articulate them. Practice has shown that solving this problem turned out to be a much more difficult enterprise than connecting new arms and legs to the body of a paralyzed patient.
This spring, Chartier and his colleagues were able to solve it due to the fact that they did not try to decipher the brain signals and directly "read" words and letters, but suggested that our speech centers do not encode specific sounds, but sets of instructions for the muscles of the mouth, larynx of the tongue and vocal cords. This allowed them for the first time to "honestly" read thoughts from the brains of several epileptics.
Having achieved similar successes, California neurophysiologists tried to apply the same technique in order to read not only thoughts from the speech center of volunteers, but also from those regions of the brain that are responsible for processing information from the hearing organs.
With the support of three patients in whose hearing center electrodes were implanted, the scientists began monitoring the activity of that part of the cerebral cortex as the volunteers heard or answered questions from Chartier and his colleagues.
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By recording these signals and comparing them with each other, neurophysiologists have created an algorithm that "deciphers" the commands of the brain into a language understandable for a computer. Unlike the previous version of this program, the new brainchild of Californian neurophysiologists can not only voice the "overheard" thoughts of volunteers, but also convert them into text by comparing questions and answers.
So far, this system has a fairly small "dictionary", but at the same time it can work in real time and makes mistakes much less often than other systems of a similar kind. On average, she correctly reads about three out of four words, syllables and sounds in a sentence, which is enough for communication.
Further "training" of the algorithm, as Chartier hopes, will make it possible to use this neurointerface for free communication with paralytics, victims of strokes or dumb people who have lost the ability to speak due to trauma to the skull or vocal cords.
