Mind-Reading Machine Almost A Reality

A group of scientists at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, recently revealed that they may be really close to perfecting a machine that helps translate brain signals into words, a significant breakthrough that will allow severely paralyzed people to be able to communicate their thoughts clearly.

The technology, which is an extension of that developed to help amputees obtain more control over their prosthetic limbs, involves placing microelectrode grids right above the two speech centers of the brain - One above the facial motor cortex, the area which controls speech muscles of the mouth, lips, tongue and face and the other, above Wernicke's area, which scientists believe controls language comprehension and understanding.

A volunteer was asked to repeatedly read 10 words like hungry, cold, hot, hello, goodbye - common things that a paralyzed patient would want to communicate. Every time, he read a word, they recorded the brain signal, observing that they were slightly different in almost every case.

The scientists than took the experiment one step further by playing all ten brain patterns simultaneously. In this case they were able to pick out the correct word between 28-48 percent of the time - An extremely encouraging result and a huge improvement over the current way of communicating that entails either the blinking of eyes or movement of hands.

Now that they have proof of concept, the team is going to work on getting the technology better - by probably increasing the size of the electrodes, so that they can get better signals. They hope to have a working prototype ready in a year or two. Pretty awesome, unless of course the device falls into the wrong hands - Like your parents or teachers. Now there's a scary thought!

sources: gizmondo.com, telegraph.co.uk