TRIP

Secrets of the inner voice unlocked

NHS Choices Behind the Headlines, 2012

Hundreds of conditions explained Over 100 topics on healthy living Help for those looking after others Health news stories unspun Don't miss out ...
“Mind-boggling! Science creates computer that can decode your thoughts and put them into words,” the Daily Mail’s headline exclaimed today, while The Daily Telegraph heralded an era in which a “mind-reading device could become a reality”.
You’d be forgiven for thinking famous mind readers such as Derren Brown had just produced a telepathy implant.
Instead, these reports are from a small study of 15 people that culminated in researchers being able to reconstruct the sound patterns of words using brain activity alone.
This research involved attaching electrical sensors directly to brains of people undergoing brain surgery to understand how they processed individual words that were played to them.
The researchers demonstrated that the brain breaks words down into complex patterns of electrical activity.
They were then able to create a mathematical algorithm that decoded and translated the brain activity back into a rough version of the original sound.
But the reconstructed words were not of good enough quality to be recognised by a human listener when played.
The words were only recognised when the original and reconstructed sound patterns were compared visually.
This exciting and new research does raise the prospect of brain activity one day being translated into words using an implant.
But it is important to recognise that this research is in its very early stages and a clinically effective implant is likely to be a long way off.