Slashdot Mirror
Major Breakthrough in Direct Neural Interface
jd writes "In a major breakthrough, neurologists are reporting that they can decypher neurological impulses into speech with an 80% accuracy. A paralyzed man who is incapable of speech has electrodes implanted in his brain which detect the electrical pulses in the brain relating to speech. These signals are then fed into computers which covert these pulses into signals suitable for speech synthesis. As a biotech marvel, this is astonishing. Depending on the rate of development it is possible to imagine Professor Hawking migrating to this, as it would be immune to any further loss of body movement and would vastly accelerate his ability to talk. On the flip-side, direct brain I/O is also a major step towards William Gibson's Neuromancer and other cyberpunk dark futures."
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
"We hope it will be a breakthrough," says Joe Wright of Neural Signals, which has helped develop the technology. While this is indeed promising, and I hope that this 'unlocks' this poor fellow, this 'unlocking' has not happened yet. Hopefully, when they are able to decipher these signals, he's not saying, "Kill me" over and over again.
And yes, that entire story was just so I could "drop" that I have a wife in a slashdot post. Cunning, huh?
Your wife's recovery and you staying with her, through all of that, is the most poignant thing I have read on Slashdot, ever.
A story like yours deserves to be told, and demands that we listen.
May the winds always be at your back.
This is my sig.
But your kind of reasoning could also be used inside out, eg: "Mr. Gibson's dark future is a technological failure and not an economical/political one. That nasty future comes from a tyrannical group of technologists who misuse the social system."
What I want to say is technology and politics/economics are all a creature of humans. It's just as misleading blaming "economics" and "politics" instead of the people misusing the system (who are basically all of us), as it is to blame a particular technology for all of our miseries.
Thanks, that's quite helpful. I could find no details about this on my own, lacking a New Scientist subscription. He isn't "imagining" these sounds - he's trying to produce them. I suspect they've tapped into the motor cortex, where one of the last stages of motor processing. They're not tapping into "speech" centers - it's simply a motor area associated with articulatory muscles. Not that it isn't impressive, but it's not a step towards mind-reading or better computer-human interfaces unless you suffer from a muscle- or nerve-based speech disorder. We've understood to specific relationships between regions of the motor cortex and muscles in the body for quite some time. Actual language centers are far more mysterious.
> you would need to do some sort of heroic measure of training for each individual
Not be be callous, but I'm pretty sure they can find time in their busy eating, sleeping, and bedpan changing schedules in order to regain the ability to communicate with the world.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
As a slashdot.dot reader it goes without saying that I love to revel in the latest tech but, stories like this one prove that it is people like you and your wife that are the true inspirations in the world. All the tech and science is wasted if it can't benefit people with "real lives" like yours. Like tjstork said: "A story like yours deserves to be told, and demands that we listen." Any that don't listen, cut them selves off to reality and lose out on more than they can dream of. -papvf
Tyranny has been around since before the stone age. What has technology got to do with it other than increasing the tyrant to subject ratio? The desire to oppress is inherently a human social one. Some will claim (neocons for instance) that we can use tyranny to make things better, but it doesn't work that way. Technology, on the other hand is much more legitimately separable from human motivation (there are a variety of motivations that can lead to most technologies.) Moreover, unlike tyranny, we have a chance of using a given technology only(or at least predominately) for good. Technology is a double edged sword, in part because it and its fruits are actually tools, not motivations unto themselves.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The majority of Western values do not trace their roots to any of the Middle Eastern religions. They come from other places, such as Greek philosophers.
In fact, the philosophical foundations of the US are in many ways opposite to the so-called Christian values. Cruel and unusual punishment, for example, is condoned--actually commanded--by the Christian god. Slavery, and the belief that all men are NOT created equal, is a common theme in the Bible.
The statesmen/philosophers who founded this country may have been Christian, but the documents they wrote to found this country were quite the opposite.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Actually, most of the founding fathers were Deist, not Christian.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
One has to wonder who is doing the work. Is the paralyzed man adapting to the computer or is the computer learning the brain signals. Either way, it's good work, but I would bet that the way to perfect this type of technology is to "teach" the human to control his neurological impulses. I doubt the technology is directly eavesdropping on his speech.
Chris Mesterharm