NASA Develops Tech To Hear Words Not Yet Spoken

alex_guy_CA writes "Yahoo News has a story about technology that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken, by analyzing nerve commands to the throat. 'A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain,' said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or 'silent speech' to be captured. The story indicates the method could be useful on space missions or other difficult working conditions."

Comments

sub-vocal communication

[mmoncur]

Wow! Combine this with a transmitter and receiver, and you get the ability to have sub-vocal backchannel communication with people--I think it was Gregory Benford who wrote a series of books that featured something like this.

Way better than text messaging.

Re:sub-vocal communication

[Cornelius the Great]

The sequels to the Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) books featured this technology as well. Ender would subvocalize with Jane, who travelled on the ansible.

Good story, good universe. I hear there's an Ender's Game movie in the works.

Re:sub-vocal communication

[Anonymous Coward]

Combine this with a transmitter and receiver, and you get the ability to have sub-vocal backchannel communication with people

Or the ability to "wiretap" the things floating around in someone's head, the dissents they thought that they were voicing only to themselves.

Thoughtcrime, indeed.

So sort of like...

[NSash]

...that system Ender used to talk to Jane? That would be sooo cool. (Now, all I need is an omniscient AI with root access on every machine connected to the Internet...)

Could be dangerous

[IANAL(BIAILS)]

I mean - there are a lot of things that I *think* about some of my coworkers, especially during meetings, but I always am able to catch myself right before I say anything. You'd *really* have to watch yourself plugged into that thing!

Re:Could be dangerous

[indigeek]

It should not be too much of a problem once people get used to it. And it shouldnt be too much more difficult than to control than actually (vocally) talking without thinking.
Humans right now are trained to keep their mouth shut even when they are thinking, or even talk exactly opposite of what they think. We yet are not used to controlling the previous level, ie subconsciously talking (ever noticed people at bus stops muttering to themselves or even smiling?) .Once this technology has become mainstream, we should be able to adapt and to think only at a brain level instead of translating into vocal commands. (Qustion: Do Spanish people think differently from Chinese people who don't have a proper phonetic language if they are thinking to themselves?)
And I think we have done this before. Imagine a non-humanoid alien landing on earth. I am sure he would be surprised that all the humans can actually balance themselves on 2 foot and even run around (They would probably think it a waste trying to balance yourself on a point while crawling is much less brain intensive). And Imagine, these beings can even balance themselves on 2 inch thick wheels around a metre above earth (bicycles).And this technique has no evolutionary basis, almost all the humans learned it within a 100 years or so. Looks like a very adaptable race to me.

Re:Could be dangerous

[Mr. Slippery]

Is abstract thought possible without language?

Yes. How could one aquire language if thought wasn't there already? Consider the rare feral children adults who have grown up without acquiring language - do you think they're "dark inside"? Or even more fascinating, Helen Keller, who acquired language late enough to have memories that pre-dated that acquisition.

Consult any Zen master for further instruction - that which the Japanese call "mushin" ("no-mind") might be thought of as "thinking without words". (Of course, there is a difference between transcending linguistic thought, and never acquiring it in the first place.)

But in thinking of mushin as thinking without words, you are thinking with words, and thus getting away from the actual phenomenon. Thus Zen Master Seung Sahn's observation "open mouth, already a mistake".

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are when he is not calculating and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. -- D.T. Suzuki

What?

[Gary Yogurt]

Isn't that lip-reading technology we had on that Jupiter mission three years ago good enough?

finally...

[mattkime]

....they can hear you scream in space.

As if the aliens weren't enough...

[Anaxagor]

Now I'll have to break out some more aluminium and extend the tinfoil hat into a full-face helmet.

Benefit for Stephen Hawking?

[william_lorenz]

I wonder if this could benefit Stephen Hawking? Good thing he's got friends at NASA. ;)

Lie Detector

[Nermal6693]

This could potentially take a lie detector to a new level - people are likely going to think over their possible responses before replying, and this could be used to obtain those thoughts. Scary.

I'll take the Fifth - NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

INTERROGATOR: "I'll ask you once more - Did you kill Mrs. Finkelstein?"

PRISONER: "..."

INTERROGATOR: "Aha! And where did you hide her body?"

Re: I'll take the Fifth - NOT!

[Black Parrot]

> INTERROGATOR: "I'll ask you once more - Did you kill Mrs. Finkelstein?"

PRISONER: [God, what a fine set of tits!] "No."

INTERROGATOR: [Me, or Mrs. Finkelstein?] "We have the evidence."

Re:I'll take the Fifth - NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

VOTING MACHINE: "Democrat, or Republican?"

VOTER: "Ummm..."

VOTING MACHINE: "Republican. *DING* Next voter, please!"

Dating

[Mr. Certainly]

Guys, no matter how geeky and nerdy you want to be, NEVER TAKE THIS INVENTION ON A DATE!

Useful if it works...

[Kulic]

but it'll probably be years before we see it commercially.

Imagine using voice commands to control your computer remotely - you're on a croweded bus, using your cell phone to connect to your house computer, telling it subvocally to turn on the airconditioning in time for when you get home, to turn on the coffee maker and download some work from the office and a movie for later. And no one hears anything, and the only thing they can see moving is your throat. What about dictating a letter on your way home, or other documents?

What about secret service agents? Or the military? No more needing to talk into their sleeves or using noisy radio to give away their position. You could have the conversation turn up on a pda screen, or have an artifical voice piped into ear phones. How cool would that be?

I'm sure there's lots more stuff you could use this for that I haven't even thought of yet, but I'm betting it is still years away.

Interesting uses...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Navy Seals on a mission: great way to communicate to each other in stealth.

Sports cheating: communicate perfectly to coach when you are not supposed to.

Croc Hunter: sneak up on animals in the wild to research, etc, and communicate with team and not startle animals.

Porn: somehow... someway...

Government: give tech 20 more years and when these signals can be picked up remotely, let FBI tap the signals without a court order because, hey, there is a War On Terror(TM) to fight.

Interrorgation: capture truth someone would have wanted/started to say but then held their tounge at the last second.

Slashdot: this tech + reconition to text + scripting = best chance at first post. Just think about BSD dying, and it's dead!

A couple implications

[Schlemphfer]

There are times when we think in complete sentences, and times when we just rely on non-verbal thinking. Generally, the more planned the act, the more likely that complete sentences pass through your brain.

For instance, you're more likely to simply pick a quarter off the floor than to say, "I am going to pick this quarter off the floor." Whereas, you're very likely to think the sentence, "I should buy some wine on my way home from the market" if that's part of your plans.

Seems to me that this technology could, in short order, discern the verbal sentences we fashion for ourselves as part of our daily thinking. But it won't ever pick up on the million thoughts we have each day that aren't based on words.

If this technology gets deployed, society will have to learn in short order that not every thought is legitimate. My verbalizing the thought to myself, "I am Napoleon" does not necessarily mean that I think I am Napoleon.

One last thought. If we get widespread, cheap deployment of this technology, it will have as big an effect on our lives as the World Wide Web.

cellular phones !

[S3D]

At last I will not have to hear four persons shouting in their phones just around my pen in the open space. And there will not be those mad-looking people talking into the empty space on the street. On the other side, someone who talk other the phone a lot may forget actually produce sounds while talking with somebody nearby.

Old news

[Underholdning]

I've had a device that could detect (and react) to words I haven't even spoken yet, for years now. I call the device "wife".

Re:No real difference

[gantrep]

The way I see it, there are three kinds of silent reading.

The first involves real subvocalization, meaning people that read out loud very quietly and move their lips. I don't want to offend anyone, but I find it kind of annoying when people do that. Don't know why. The number of people that do this is in my experience, a minority and occurs most often in people that are weak readers or intentionally reading very carefully. I actually will do it myself when I am following chemistry lab instructions or sometimes when I read in Spanish, a second language.

The next kind of reading is what I think is the most common. There is no subvocalization of any kind, no tongue moving inside the mouth, no vocal chord movement, but words written are mentally translated first to sound-thought and then comprehended. I'm not sure if sound-thought makes sense but it's the best description I can think of. Sound-thought is then what is actually processed and understood by the brain. This I think is most common because I believe that most people's thought process takes the form of an internal monologue. A notable exception is that I know when I do calculus, there is a lot of visualization, algebra, logic and simple math going on in my head and very little verbal thought.

The last kind of reading I think could be considered a form of speed-reading, though I have never taken any speed-reading instruction. I use this whenever I am not reading for pleasure and the passage need not be read super-carefully. I look at the words very quickly and directly process them without first converting to internal sound-thought. If the passage is divided into narrow columns, I can process a whole line at a time and scan straight down the page without any lateral eye-movement.

The level of comprehension and retention when I do this is worse than with methods one or two, but it's extremely fast. The biggest advantage for me anyway that it has over methods one and two is that I retain parts of the text visually. I have a quasi-photographic memory and when I took a course in US History for example, I was able to read names and dates off pages in visual memory because I read the text in that manner.

Now, to get a little more back on topic....

When I was in high school, I competed in quiz bowl trivia competitions like jeopardy, but the questions are only read aloud, and you can buzz in and interrupt the reader at any time before the question is finished and give an answer. Our team and other very good teams learned ways to anticipate the question.

Some teams' familiarity with the subtle structure and format of the questions gave them such a strong intuition that weak teams would swear they were cheating. You got to know individual readers and how much they will continue to read after you buzz in(sometimes finishing the word, sometimes mid-syllable.) Which brings me to my point; if you watch somebody's mouth very carefully when they speak, as they are ending a word and starting to form the next, it's easy to tell what the next letter out of their mouth will be.

A teammate of mine once rang in after a reader had read the letter "J" and then stopped. He could tell the next letter was going to be D, and there had already been several similar questions in earlier rounds asking for different information concerning the same subject that he could tell pretty certainly what the question was going to ask(questions often repeat subject but rarely answers between rounds) So he answered Holden Caulfield.

The other team wasn't pleased at all.

This skill could be practical in interrogations of criminal/terrorist suspects and is what I first thought of when I read the headline of the story. (A better headline would be Nasa develops computer processing of subvocal speech.) A suspect under a lot of stress may come close enough to giving you a name that you can tell from the shape of their mouth that it probably starts with an L rather than a T before refusing to speak any more, and that might be enough.