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."
The subject turns out to have Tourettes syndrome?
OI! [redacted] will you [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] make me a [redacted][redacted][redacted] cup of [redacted] coffee?
Brain obscenity filters for teh wins....
They have hooked up to 41 neurons and:
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
"Beeeeeep."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
What drives the advances of the last couple decades?
Two desires:
1. To restore Stephen Hawking's physical body to its former fully-functional form.
2. To turn Stephen Hawking into a mobile, indestructible cyborg of incomprehensible power.
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.
Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago.
What do you do for eight years as a locked in? Wouldn't that drive a normal person insane or dull the mind beyond all recognition? Does anyone know about the mental state of these people?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I'm guessing the 80% comes from the fact that this is an issue of the linear separability of signals. Its generally hard to get reliable sensitivity/specificity measures over this that anyone is going to take seriously.
Sensitivity = percentage number of correct identifications
Specificity = corresponding percentage of incorrect identifications at each measured sensitivity.
Probably they can get up to 90%, but from experience I would say the rate of false positives at this sensitivity likely is moving towards exponential increase. It's better to stop at 80%, at least when something is in the early stages.
This is just guessing of course, I have no understanding of their research, but going from my own work on non linearly separable sets, I'd say this is what's happening.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I can see it going something like this...
Researcher: "The machine translates his electrical pulses as 'I'd really enjoy a blowjob from your assistant, Ms. Jenkins.' Ms. Jenkins, do you mind?"
Ms. Jenkins: "Anything in the name of science!!"
Researcher: "Well, that ear-to-ear smile is conclusive proof that he is in fact enjoying it. Eureka, it works!!!"
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly
he could blink. that's it. yes or no. and with that ability, letter by letter, he wrote a book (with the help of some very patient nurses/ assistants)
it's coming out as a movie soon too i think
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39133
"With the new exoskeleton, Stephen will be able to safely handle radioactive isotopes in the high-radiation area of the new supercollider particle accelerator. And his new robo-arms are capable of ripping open enemy tanks like they were nutshells,"
My wife was in a massive car accident, a decade ago. She was in a coma for a month, suffered brain injuries, a collapsed lung, shattered arm, cracked eye socket, multiply broken jaw, etc. A national merit scholarship winner before the accident, her parents were told that, if she survived, she'd likely never walk much or be able to look after herself again.
As it happened, she was sufficiently beaten up at the time that she had no concept of how bad her injuries were. She got out of the wheelchair simply because it frustrated her. She went back to working part time simply because she didn't realize she wasn't supposed to be able to. By the time she comprehended what had happened, she'd improved enough that setting impossible goals like "become a personal trainer" weren't quite so impossible. We taught her to read again (yes, even that got messed up) and even managed to get her back in to school - initially only able to pull a 2.0 average but improved each semester.
In her case, she had an amazing recovery. Yet she, herself, says, "If I'm ever like that again, turn me off." She didn't realize how hurt she was and got lucky with recovering before she did. Understanding now, she has absolutely no desire to try that fight again. She'd rather just call it a day.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
And yes, that entire story was just so I could "drop" that I have a wife in a slashdot post. Cunning, huh?
They know it's accurate because the voice translation told them it was! It then said something about "robotic voice translator overlords..." We're not sure about that bit. (:
how would it bea ble to differentiate between "out loud" voice and private thoughts? This could be really embarrasing for users. Imagine if a secretary (or nurse) walks by when you're in the middle of speaking or dictating a letter:
Dear sir,
I am writing wow nice tits and she has a great ass too uh oh wedding ring in order to ask if you would be interested in our new product line of neural-input word processors.
It reads: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"
What do you want to decipher today?
Would a device like this work on someone who doesn't know how to speak english or better yet a baby that speaks no language at all
The answer is "Yes" (but not the way you intended) and "No."
It would work for a non-English speaker IFF that speaker was trying to speak his native language; what they've detected is the brain's intention to produce a SOUND; so, by extension, the interpretation is producing a phonetic representation of the sounds in the person's head.
It isn't interpreting the concept of the sound (someone isn't thinking of a cat and the word "cat" is produced). It should be possible for someone speaking any language (including a made-up one) to use this system.
For a baby (who has no word associated with the object), it wouldn't provide any use... unless your conjecture is that a baby doesn't speak because the muscles in her throat aren't strong enough to form words, but her brain knows what sounds would be made. Then... sure, it would work. 8)
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
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.
> 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
Now you are just putting words in his mouth. :)
This is great. Now all we have to do is reverse the fucker so it figures out 80% garbage and 20% signal. Then we attach it to congress critters, lawyers, and RIAA stoges. Now we don't have to listen to their shit at all anymore.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Subject's first words? "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
The article says the man is 'locked in', which means that he not only cannot speak, but he has no voluntary movement whatsoever, even blinking eyelids.
There was an article recently in New Scientist about this. One problem doctors studying this field have is that since it is an experimental treatment, they need consent of the patient, and how can they get consent if the patient can't communicate?
With some locked-in patients, they are able to respond based on the acidity of their saliva. They are told to either imagine eating lemons (for yes) or eating milk (for no), and their saliva sympathetically adjusts to their thoughts. Then their saliva is measured. See more here: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/locked_in_with_the_b.html
Sad to say it, but I suspect the first thing the patient will say is "kill me".
No need; Ms Jenkins is reputed to be quite competent. ;-)
For those curious, this speech prosthesis research was presented in a number of posters at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference a couple weeks ago. Their six SfN posters can be found on their website here, covering topics like the circuitry they developed, Bayesian signal analysis, and so forth:
http://migrate.speechprosthesis.org/DNN2/SpeechProsthesisHome/tabid/52/Default.aspx
There's also a nice blog entry on this over at Neurophilosophy:
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/11/speech_prosthesis.php
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
Remember, it's only 80% accurate. It may be more like "rigm!" or "prong!"
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.
I have time to kill on lunch. Let's see...
Right Wrong = 10 letters.
P in Prong = 1
M in rigm = 1 (+1 letter missing)
1 missing = 1/2
So, (10 - 2.5)/10 = 0.75 ~ 80%
Your post above not only meets funny standards, but accolades for careful thought in using relevant and accurate choice of words. Well done, sir, well done!
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Actually, most of the founding fathers were Deist, not Christian.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Frist wrods!!"
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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
Gibson didn't invent cyberspace. Vernor Vinge invented cyberspace (although I don't think he coined the term) in True Names.
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. Read True Names to get a notion of the profound visionary Vernor Vinge is. (Remember it was published in 1981).
Then read Rainbows End with your newfound respect for Vinge's powers of prognostication, and recognize that you're seeing into the near future.