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Brain Implants Can Detect What Patients Hear
kkleiner writes "A group of 15 patients suffering from either epileptic seizures or brain tumors volunteered to allow scientists to insert electrodes into their brains. After neurosurgeons cut a hole in their skulls, the research team placed 256 electrodes over the part of the brain that processes auditory signals called the temporal lobe. The scientists then played words, one at a time, to the patients while recording brain activity in the temporal lobe. A computer was able to reconstruct the original word 80 to 90 percent of the time."
Here come the thought police!!!
We need more articles like this. It's an encouraging progress in neuroscience.
My dreams of a womanspeak translator implant are on the horizon. Now, if they can just develop the technology to translate "Leave me the fuck alone until the game is over." into a more palatable sentence...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Earlier in my career when I had to do level 1 tech support I might have liked opportunity to cut holes in skulls to make sure people heard what was being said. However, *hearing* what's being said and actually processing that into meaningful and actionable instructions are two different things.
It's pretty neat they can do this when they are doing the equivalent of a voltmeter to figure out how a processor works.
but the first thing I thought of when I read that scientists can now detect what is being heard is: "I wonder before the copyright police make this implant technology mandatory in order to catch unlicensed listening?"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Soon everyone will be forced to have such an implant, so that people can be properly billed for every music they hear.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That the electrical signals received by the brain from the ear would actually directly correspond to the actual soundwaves received by the ear...
I'm sorry... but in what way is this any more revolutionary in discovery than the telephone?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
From the PLoS paper: "To assess decoding accuracy, the reconstructed spectrogram is compared to the spectrogram of the original acoustic waveform". The number of words used in the experiment was 47 and the reconstructed spectrogram was compared to the 47 spectrograms of acoustic waveforms used in the experiment. That could be done with 90% accuracy. If the input waveform would have been unknown, the reconstruction would not aid at all in knowing what word the patient listened to.
Because a microphone that is on a person's body is going to pick up everything that person hears as well.
And for that matter, it will probably be loads more reliable than trying to decode electrical signals that we are only just beginning to comprehend.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe I didn't read it here, but I'm pretty sure I did.
And soon gangsters are gonna need MRIs to ensure someone isn't carrying surveillance gear...
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Because a microphone that is on a person's body is going to pick up everything that person hears as well.
And for that matter, it will probably be loads more reliable than trying to decode electrical signals that we are only just beginning to comprehend.
Experiments such as this one are the reason we are beginning to comprehend the electrical signals in the brain. The goal of the experiment isn't to understand WHAT the patients are hearing, but HOW the patients are hearing.
Hey, I'm not dissing finding out more about how the brain works.... but being able to detect what a person hears is really no more complicated than putting a microphone near that person.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I could have sworn that I saw this story before on /.
Why? They can't afford a 16-bit microcontroller?
It should also be possible to prompt you (or force you) to think about the word (either its meaning, or to hallucinate the sound, depending on where you link in) by injecting a current, enabling a more direct link to an external memory, such as the Internet.
The HUGE catch in all this is it requires an inter-cranial electrode array, which is currently only justified when there is some dire medical need for it, such as people constantly plagued by severe seizures. What we really need is a less invasive way to get those into there.
Sorry, "intra-cranial," i.e. inside your skull. Otherwise the sensing is much more limited (EEG).
While this has been postulated before, to the best of my knowledge, this premise has yet to be conclusively proven.
Of course, being able to determine what words people are thinking of is a *HUGE* deal... and one that has almost frightening consequences.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Being able to reconstruct the sound from analyzing electrical signals in the brain, however?
This could be groundbreaking research. Especially for hearing implants.
Oh, I follow you now..."Brain implants can detect what patients hear"...so do microphones, clever :)
Can't see the forest for the trees.
Summary seems to be hung up on the reconstructed words aspect, so not entirely your fault. Still, go back and reread what alphamax posted.
"The goal of the experiment isn't to understand WHAT the patients are hearing, but HOW the patients are hearing."
The experimenters already knew what the people were hearing, they were playing back prerecorded words. More formally, the question is "How does the human auditory system extract perceptually relevant acoustic features of speech?"
Well, if they are hearing the sound at the time, then no... I'm afraid I don't think that's a big a deal. The electrical signals transmitted from the eardrum to the brain would naturally have a pretty tight correspondence with the sound waves received, and I would naturally expect that electrical activity in the brain corresponding to regions associated with hearing would be similarly correspondent. The breakthrough will happen when they can construct the sound directly from what they are thinking, and not simply actually hearing with their ears.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What if you're trying to figure out if a hearing problem is in the cochlea or in the wetware?
Maybe my idea of using VR goggles and a dataglove to create a virtual a rolodex wasn't so crazy after all.
These stories about how the technology is still in the experimental stages are all bogus and intentional disinformation. Many thousands of people already have their brains implanted with this tech 100% NON-CONSENSUALLY. It is called synthetic telepathy. It transmits not only what you hear but what you see, think and feel back to the originator. Just google "targeted individuals or "synthetic telepathy" and you will see what I mean.
A lot of new age people are duped into thinking they have developed telepathic powers due to being "spiritually advanced" or "in tune with the earth" or other such BS. In reality they are MKULTRA mind control victims of the present day.
Military black operations have been carried out for years to put the tech into people's heads. Remember all those "alien abduction" stories in the media for the past 10-20 years? Those people really were being abducted and implanted, but not by aliens.
For more information visit http://www.karlaturner.org/
If they'd played all the words at the same time instead of one at a time, the electrodes would have exploded from being over driven by an over stimulated brain.
Breast Implants Can hear What you're Thinking!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Eventually, holes will not be necessary. Better SQUIDS + cuda = mind reading from a distance. By 2020 0r 2030 at the latest, I would conjecture.
I was contemplating following this line of research, but it seems that these guys got there before me. Must have read my mind!
. .
A pity the authors neglected to site your previous neurological research. Clearly you've got this all figured out.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Who the f*** pays these guys?
Could these scientists tin foil my skull?
That's not that amazing really...
This level of accuracy (or higher) is about what speech software (Dragon or Siri) is achieving by just listening to the sound waves themselves. So if anything, the ear and cochlear filter and clean the signal (removing background noise) so it should be easier to use this signal to interpret the words.
Hopefully research work like this will lead to cures for conditions like Tinnitus, the ringing sound that people hear. It's already apparent that the ringing noises don't always originate in the ear as severing the auditory nerve to the brain doesn't always get rid of the ringing sound. It seems the brain is involved in generating the noisy signal.
If work like this indicates where the false sound is coming from, perhaps another, active, implant could eliminate it.
Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that ... the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Hey, I'm not dissing finding out more about how the brain works....
Really? After reading your other two posts it sounds an awful lot like you are.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Citizen 392417, your aural implant has detected that you were just made a bribery offer. Do not attempt to deny it, we have the transcript right here...
The electrical signals transmitted from the eardrum to the brain would naturally have a pretty tight correspondence with the sound waves received
Near the ear (i.e., auditory nerve), that would be mostly correct. For low frequencies (<2 kHz), the summed impulses on the auditory nerve look very much like the acoustic signal. For high frequencies, they look only like the overall envelope of the acoustic signal, but that's still pretty good and good enough to figure out most speech.
and I would naturally expect that electrical activity in the brain corresponding to regions associated with hearing would be similarly correspondent.
Mostly incorrect. Neurons in cortex fire very slowly (on the order of Hz), often eve nonce per "signal" (loosely defined, discrete chunk of audio). The pathway goes auditory nerve > cochlear nucleus > superior olive > lateral lemniscus > inferior colliculus > medial geniculate > auditory cortex. Very cool, complex computations are being performed at every stage that transform a time waveform received at the eardrum to a perception of sound and the world around you. To understand what the signals at the cortex mean is a huge insight toward reverse-engineering the brain, so don't knock it before you understand it.