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Neuroscientists Offer a Reality Check On Facebook's 'Typing By Brain' Project (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Yesterday, Facebook announced that it's working on a "typing by brain" project, promising a non-invasive technology that can decode signals from the brain's speech center and translate them directly to text (see the video beginning at 1:18:00). What's more, Facebook exec Regina Dugan said, the technology will achieve a typing rate of 100 words per minute. Here, a few neuroscientists are asked: Is such a thing remotely feasible? One neuroscientist points out that his team set the current speed record for brain-typing earlier this year: They enabled a paralyzed man to type 8 words per minute, and that was using an invasive brain implant that could get high-fidelity signals from neurons. To date, all non-invasive methods that read brain signals through the scalp and skull have performed much worse. Thomas Naselaris, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, says, "Our understanding of the way the words and their phonological and semantic attributes are encoded in brain activity is actually pretty good currently, but much of this understanding has been enabled by fMRI, which is noninvasive but very slow and not at all portable," he said. "So I think that the bottleneck will be the [optical] imaging technology," which is what Facebook's gear will be using.
From what I learned doing research, I also think 100 words per minute is extreme. You wouldn't believe the artifacts you get just from blinking or moving a leg or finger, and I had a 21 channel MITSAR and WinEEG to work with. The only way this is going to work is if Facebook has plans involving AI and quantum computing, a very dangerous combination for privacy. This is because an AI would have to get to know your brain waves on an incredibly intimate level, making encryption a joke when your brain is getting digitally fingerprinted. If what they say works, both the polygraph test and "truth serum" would be a joke. The only actual application for finding brainwave averages between people currently is to add to the "what are artifacts" knowledge and perhaps a quick and dirty diagnoses. Very rarely have I ever been able to use EEG to find correlations in research because everyone is too different and there is always some kind of confounding variable. Biofeedback projects in EEG sort of works for fun little things, but it's not the same thing as "mind reading" or 100 words per minute good. Now, I've played around with Tobii eye tracking, and that would be their best bet. In the the Linux and open source world we have a program called Dasher that may work with eye tracking to get their quota. Besides, doesn't Facebook have enough biometric data or are their government overlords hungry for more? This is why they'll never go bankrupt, as long as they have projects like this. Meanwhile, other more important research gets cut.