Can scientists turn thoughts into speech?
Hope for paralyzed patients as researchers develop implants to read the mind’s ‘inner voice’
Scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to translate the thoughts of patients who have lost their speech into words. Technology has made leaps and bounds to bridge the rift that forms between mind and body when one ( or both) are damaged by disease.
Amputees can now be fit with futuristic mind-controlled body limbs; bionic eyes give sight to the sightless, cochlear implants allows the deaf to hear.
Restoring speech, however, presents unique challenges and has mostly remained in the realm of science fiction and the (mostly) pseudoscience of telepathy.
Ambitious scientists scattered across the world are on the brink of changing that with implants that act as ‘ brain- computer interfaces’ that may soon be able to broadcast the voices inside a speechless patients’ heads.
A computer interface let Stephen Hawking talk - but it didn’t listen to his brain
Up until his death in March, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking was one of the most influential and famous thinkers, teachers and speakers of the last century.
But for the last 30 years of his life, he had no voice.
Computer assistance allowed the brilliant astrophysicist to go on to speak all over the world nonetheless. The voice of ‘ Perfect Paul’ - an early synthesized speech tool with an American accent designed for telephone prompt responses - became Hawking’s signature tenor.
Synthetic voice technology improved, but Hawking stuck with Paul’s slightly halting speech. He did, however, progress through various control mechanisms.
Once his thumb could no longer choose letters, an innovative system that picked up on the subtle twitches of his cheeks allowed Hawking to go on communicating.
But Perfect Paul never did read Hawking’s brilliant mind directly. ‘Speaking’ meant a letter-selection process that - even with the latest and greatest predictive text technologies - would always undoubtedly be slower than the great scientist’s natural speech and meditations on the history of time.
Scientists are ‘listening’ to brain signals to learn its electrical vocabulary
Now, neuroscientists and engineers at Columbia University and Northwell Health in New York are mapping the brain’s private language so that they may soon be able to translate the voice inside our heads.
Different regions of the brain communicate with one another through a combination of electrical impulses and chemical messengers. Listening and speech are centered in Broca’s area, which is responsible both for the brain’s voice and the ‘mind’s ear,’ as well. And Wernicke’s area controls our word choices.
The collaborators at Columbia University and Northwell Health in New York hope that by listening in on the brain’s most intimate conversations with itself, they might learn how to translate its electrical language into words the outside world will understand via a brain computer interface, Stat News reports.
This would be life- changing to patients with paralysis from injuries, ALS or locked-in syndrome.
ALS often eventually attacks the bulbar neurons, which control the motor function or movements involved in the physical act of speaking.