By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to “hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.
"If someone was completely paralyzed, or if a patient had locked-in syndrome with no movement, but the brain was still active and we could understand it well enough, we could develop devices to take advantage of that and restore communication," said Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's still very early," he added. "And a lot of work still needs to be done."
For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how our brains manage to process audible sounds and extract abstract meaning from words and sentences. As part of that effort, lots of work on animals has helped narrow in on the brain regions involved in hearing and responding to sounds.
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To see how those findings might be applicable in people, Pasley and colleagues enlisted the help of 15 patients with epilepsy or brain tumors who had electrodes attached to the surface of their brains in order to map out the source of their seizures. With electrodes in place, participants listened to about 50 different speech sounds in the form of sentences and words, both real and fake, such as "jazz," "peace," "Waldo," "fook' and "nim."
After mapping out the brain's electrical responses to each sound, the research team found that they could predict which of two sounds from the study set the brain was responding to, and they could do it with about 90 percent accuracy
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