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Medicine

New Brain Device Is First To Read Out Inner Speech 29

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScientificAmerican: After a brain stem stroke left him almost entirely paralyzed in the 1990s, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book about his experiences -- letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet. Today people with similar conditions often have far more communication options. Some devices, for example, track eye movements or other small muscle twitches to let users select words from a screen. And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however -- and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common "attempted speech" devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say. But the motor cortex doesn't only light up when we attempt to speak; it's also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their "inner speech" decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new "inner speech" system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words.
To help keep private thoughts private, the researchers implemented a code phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" that participants could use to prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

New Brain Device Is First To Read Out Inner Speech

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  • Job Obsolescence (Score:4, Interesting)

    by walkerp1 ( 523460 ) on Saturday August 16, 2025 @12:06AM (#65593456)
    Well, that's going to revolutionize interrogation I suppose. I don't think the practitioners will appreciate the assist though. It threatens their artistic expression.
    • https://www.wired.com/1999/10/... [wired.com]
      Wired Magazine - Oct 7, 1999 12:00 PM
      A Cat's Eye View

      In a dramatic demonstration of mind reading, neuroscientists have created videos of what a cat sees by using electrodes implanted in the animal's brain. Yang Dan, Fei Li and Garrett Stanley of the University of California, Berkeley, were able to reconstruct in startling detail scenes flashed before a cat's eyes. The reconstructed scenes clearly demonstrate [] ...

      The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in an anesth

      • Think twice. The researchers knew the input vectors (real images presented to the cats eye ) and output vectors ( neuronal firing patterns). They likely created a transition matrix between the firing-pattern f(r,t) and what they ASSUMED the cat experienced .. namely the original images. They COULD(?) have created a matrix to transform that same neuronal firing pattern into Debbi-Does-Dallas! I see no mention of control experiments where different current firing patterns are ass
    • You still need to beat them until they start thinkIng what you want...

  • I remember a time when I would've been really excited and hopeful about this. Where the aliens who are supposed to come decide we're not ready for technology?

  • by cawdor ( 10162661 ) on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:11AM (#65593552)

    Whilst this is great for people who cannot communicate by other means, the potential downward spiral of this is frightening. Thought is the last bastion of freedom, you can think whatever you want, no limits. The development of this kind of tech will go from physically connected medical devices, to physically connected interrogation devices (if you don't consent, you're guilty, the whole "what do you have to hide if you're innocent" trope), then the leap to wireless devices and finally just scanners everywhere that scan people's thoughts. Feeling hungry? Here's an ad for your favourite food. Feeling angry, wishing you could just slap whoever cut you off in traffic? Here's an instant fine or arrest. A dystopian nightmare.

  • To help keep private thoughts private, the researchers implemented a code phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" that participants could use to prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

    What if you want to write an article about that book/movie?

  • by amo1111 ( 10503128 ) on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:49AM (#65593582)

    If this is indeed true and goes ahead this could be a contender for one of the most detrimental inventions for human kind next to nuclear weapons.
    Think privacy, think interrogations, think political persecution, think manipulation, etc.
    I know it's great tech for people who physically need it but all in all I think there is much more potential harm than good from this.

    • You worry about a consequence of  surgically inserted external brain "ports" . That operational detail is small beans compared to the loss of individual agency (liberty) required to even get the unwilling victim on the operating table. In a republic,  enslaving a person ought to be very difficult; assuming that difficulty special cases like  free-chosen micro-surgical procedures ought to be encouraged.
    • "If you don't voluntarily submit to a brain implant you must have something to hide."

      -DHS, 2032.

  • I'm sure if you're unable to speak this sort of research inspires a huge amount of hope but it's a long, long way from being real time speech. If you click through to the actual paper there's a video clip of someone using this. It's real time processing, not real time speech. Takes a fairly long time for each prompt sentence to be replicated, there's a lot of incorrect words which it seems the user is able to correct on a word by word basis, and the initial sentences are drawn from a word pool of only 50
  • If it's not clear why Altman wants his Mengele Labs, this is it. Altman knows just making a transformer model bigger isn't going to work, so now he's looking for another idea to steal, even if it's right out of decades old ScIFi.

    Can't fraud your way into reasoning? Just use a reasoning front end. Where do you get one? Wire your AI up to a human brain. Unfortunately, Musk is ahead of you on that. But hey, at least you're still friends with Trump, he'll turn his back on your medical experimentation and

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday August 16, 2025 @09:35AM (#65593850) Journal

    Social media already gives me too much access to too many people's inner monologues that should have been kept "inner", thanks.

  • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a 2007 movie about Jean-Dominique Bauby learning to communicate by blinking his eye, watching this film is a wonderful experience.

  • Not that hard to decode.
  • Inner Speech : "I'm going to get a Nobel Peace Prize! ... Damn. ... I'm going to get a Nobel Peace Prize! ... Damn ..."

  • Note that this study doesn't create any sort of "universal" brain-to-text capability. It's tuned to the three specific individuals in the study. A fourth person's brain activity would just be noise. If you and I think of a rubber duck, our brain activity does not look similar.

  • ... with ALS who communicates with the "letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet" method. He's been paralyzed for 25 years with just eye movements and a little in his face; he's on a ventilator. Family members and caregivers facilitate talking. They have the alphabet divided into numbered groups. The facilitator begins by slowly saying "1,2,3...". The guy twitches his cheek at the appropriate time. The numbered groups are 4-5 letters in order of com

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