'Brain-to-Text' Interface Types Thoughts of Epileptic Patients

Jason Koebler writes with a link to Motherboard's article about research from the Schalk Lab of Albany, New York, where researchers "have just demonstrated for the first time that it's possible to turn a person's thoughts into a legible phrase using what they're calling a "brain-to-text" interface," writing "It's still still the early days of this technology—electrodes had to be placed directly on the brain and the 'dictionary' of phrases was limited. Still, brainwaves of thought patterns were turned into text at a rate much better than chance."

Comments

Not always good

[Anonymous Coward]

"That twelve year old girl sure is hot" Ummm, ehhh, seem to have a problem here...

Re:Not always good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yeah, it's a hot day and the air conditioning isn't working. Fortunately the freezer is working, so I can offer your niece an iced beverage.

Every Six Seconds

[randalware]

Yes, I would like a happy ending with that.

Epilepsy is irrelevant

[MichaelSmith]

According to TFA they could hook this up to anybody. It was just that epilepsy patients were having invasive surgery done anyway.

Re: Epilepsy is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I was imagining a guy having a seizure while doctors scramble to a dot-matrix printer to see what the poor guy is thinking instead of helping.

Re: Epilepsy is irrelevant

[KGIII]

I am actually greatly hoping for a day when I can have my brain interface with a computer and the internet. i will even let them put a wireless antenna on my head and an ethernet jack into my neck. I would even volunteer to be an early adopter. I figure my brain can handle any malware but I fear my brain is closed source - or at least obfuscated code.

Re:Epilepsy is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be an amazing tool for people with ALS/MND like Stephen Hawking, who lose their ability to communicate via speech/typing (Stephen can now only communicate via his cheek muscles).

Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I built a 'speech recognition' system in 1k when i was a kid. It recognised words, but to compare it to what we call 'speech recognition' is a joke. Sounds like these guys are doing someething pretty damn cool, so to have it sensationalised just hurts their cause and makes science in general look dumb.

No. it won't write a letter to mom from your thoughts, which is what the headline suggests. No i didn't RTFA.

Re:Interesting...

[Falos]

"Better than chance" gave me the context frame. Consider a spectrum: At one end we have highly abstract thought, at the other we have base emotion: hunger, anticipation, contentment, curiosity, etc. which frankly ain't shit to deduce. When exhibited like this, an EEG might as well be writing "FEAR" in bold block letters.

It's probably not that shitty. Once the appropriate code is written, it can probably recognize "I desire an apple. Tomorrow." and print it out. It might be able to recognize a person thinking "blue plus yellow makes green" and write that in words, but I wonder if it has the accuracy to recognize "three plus four makes seven".

you just lost your Right to Remain Silent

[Anonymous Coward]

You were thinking guilty thoughts and this machine transcribed your confession.

Re:you just lost your Right to Remain Silent

[NotInHere]

This is no troll. This is a danger of this technology.

Re:you just lost your Right to Remain Silent

[ShanghaiBill]

This is no troll. This is a danger of this technology.

It is both a danger and a promise of the technology. It can be used for brain-to-text, but also for other "mind-reading" tasks. A criminal suspect can be shown photos of the crime scene, or photos of the victim or other people known to be involved, and it is likely that it can detect whether the suspect recognizes the scene or person. This could be used to exonerate innocent people, but it could also be used as a tool of repressive authoritarianism to detect thought-crime.

   

Re:you just lost your Right to Remain Silent

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, no. No more than an ordinary lie detector.

I used to design neural prostheses technologies. These direct neural control systems are limited partly by the size of the electrodes, which need to be stable without causing tissue damage, which limits their minimum size. They *cannot* be connected directly to individual neurons, or they will damage and disable the individual neurons over time. But since their minimum size is so limited, they are always, *always* sampling nerve signals from dozens if not hundreds, even thousands of neurons. And the electrical noise of embedding neurons in or next to normal nerve tissue is very high indeed: you pick up all the non-digital, non-clocked impulses generated signals from all the other neurons nearby. And these aren't normal analog voltage level signals: they're impulses that auto-generate and there is *always* surrounding electrical noise unless the tissue is quite dead or disabled.

The result is that, to detect a "significant" signal, the user needs to focus a quite consistent nerve signal for an extended period to overwhelm the background noise. So we're talking half a second per bit, based on the old myo-electric work for the Boston Arm, and similar work ever since. Until and unless someone creates a much more sophisticated neural interface, the bandwidth is far, far too low for "mind reading" or even for useful motor control. Some folks have tried to create better interfaces: David Edell over at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-edell/13/1bb/200 was transecting rat nerves and putting a silicon chip with gold plated holes across cut rat nerves, and showed that the nerves could grow back through the holes. But I'm not sure how far he's gotten.

And you do *not* want to transect brain tissue and plant electrodes into the cut parts, hoping to read minds as the nerves regrow through the silicon!

, partly by the

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[Madhumeeta]

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And the message was...

[wonkey_monkey]

"Ow my brain."

Additional power gained:

[SuricouRaven]

Anyone who had done this earns the right to dance around Kevin Warwick singing 'I'm more cyborg than you are' before ordering him to stop showing off to the public and get back to doing proper science.

Good job Mr Crichton

[spiritplumber]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

YOU F6AIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

niigerness? sAnd

uh oh ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... it says "transfer ... funds ... to ... doctor's ... account ...." - yep, that's what it says!

I would get one, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

... why would I want to type thoughts of epileptic patients?

And here's a sample

[amightywind]

WDGHDFDJKKNVF%%#RGBU*(J^%$EDEW#WSD#@#!@!@$%^&*()OKJY^%RFGHCXDSAWERTYHJNMKIUYTRE$%TG LOL!

Pretty entertaining and ahead of its time.

[jpellino]

"Brainstorm" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Re:Pretty entertaining and ahead of its time.

[Anonymous Coward]

A horror version: the epileptic patients actually perceive something outside of our understanding, something terrible to which their bodies react violently. The brain to text interface reveals the issue, like the ship logs in the Event Horizon.

Incoming text.

[Anonymous Coward]

<Seizure> OMGWTFBBQ. Urg. LOL. IDK? FU M8! Wut?

Re: Incoming text.

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally people having seizures are usually trying to say "help," but they can't :( nice joke tho.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of THESE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once this tech is fully matured, human sentience will be as scalable as the cloud!

The metabrain comes. I CAN'T WAIT!!!

This is actually quite amazing, folks!

[Rydell]

This is truly incredible what they have accomplished! I was sure when I read the headline that this was going to be another typical case of modern day Slashdot headline madness. I was shocked when I read both of.the attached articles to discover this really does sound like the first step in creating brain to computer interfaces that used imagined speech to control. Very, very cool. Rather surprised at the lack of comments on this one. Maybe everyone assumed it was BS and didn't even bother clicking?

Re:This is actually quite amazing, folks!

[narcc]

We've seen this same story every few years for as long as I can remember. I don't know how you missed it.

So far, we've seen a 100% BS rate. I don't expect that to change.

Re:This is actually quite amazing, folks!

[Rydell]

DId you read the journal article? Are you saying that experiment is non-repeatable pseudoscience or something?

It sounded at least plausible to me.

Re:This is actually quite amazing, folks!

[narcc]

I'm saying it's far less dramatic than the article implies. For example, they're not reading people's thoughts (in the sense implied) or doing anything that would suggest that the technology could develop toward that end.

We've seen this countless times before. What makes you think that, this time, the sensationalized story doesn't deviate significantly from reality?

All they got consistently was

[Dripdry]

"Burma shave"