neuroscientists are getting closer to a method that will allow them to directly "connect" to human thoughts
And they - thoughts - nest with us in a special part of the brain - the superior temporal gyrus. This is part of the auditory system. She is responsible for the fact that we extract a certain meaning from the stream of sounds, distinguish words and understand their meaning. Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) climbed into it.
The experiment involved 15 people, each entered into the cranium with 256 electrodes. And they began to catch the electrical signals of the brain, which he emits when he thinks. After all, each word has its own unique set of brain impulses.
The subjects also listened to audio recordings of various words, and the devices recorded the signals arising in the brain. Unraveling the chaotic flow of electrical impulses that arose in the temporal lobe while listening to audio turned out to be difficult.
“We observed in which parts of the cerebral cortex the activity increases at the moment when a person hears sounds of a certain frequency, and by the combination of these areas we tried to restore the original sound,” explained Professor of Psychology and Neurology Robert Knight.
Researchers have found key frequencies that distinguish each speech sound from others. And then, using a computer model, they reconstructed the words that "sounded in the head" of the patients. Scientists compare this to when a pianist plays the grand piano and another pianist looks at him through a soundproof partition and "hears" the music from the movement of his fingers.
Then the volunteers were given a choice of a number of words, from which they had to choose one and think about it. It turned out that the same computer model makes it possible to guess which word the subject chose. Moreover, they even managed to recreate them, converting the recorded brain impulses back into sound waves. And thoughts sounded out loud, bypassing the vocal apparatus. True, in order to find out what word a person hears or pronounces mentally, while you have to use a small "dictionary".
“The word spoken by the brain is difficult, but intelligible,” says Dr. Pasley. - This method of "wiretapping" a person's internal monologues works quite well.
Of course, this kind of research isn't done for circus performances. The method of "reading thoughts" will make it possible to restore speech to paralyzed patients. As soon as they think about what they want to say out loud, their requests will be fulfilled.
True, the developers admit that there is still a lot of work to improve the sound recognition technique, and the procedure for inserting electrodes under the skull needs to be replaced with something more painless. Therefore, a device that deciphers thoughts will not appear soon.
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