'Mind-Reading' Device Helps Decode Your Inner Thoughts

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have made a miraculous discovery. They've found out just how to decode the "spoken" words our minds play out in our inner voices by studying what's going on inside the brain.

"If you're reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a voice in your own head," said Brian Pasley at of the university, via New Scientist magazine. "We're trying to decode the brain activity related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can allow someone who is paralysed or locked in to speak."

For the study, patients were read aloud various texts--including the Gettysburg Address, Humpty Dumpty or even Kennedy's inaugural address. Just as this was happening, researchers studied electrodes that recorded the activity of the brain and watched how certain sounds of spoken words matched up.

As it stands, when we hear a person speak, sound waves work to activate sensory neurons located inside the inner ear. As the neurons pass information to different areas of the brain, different sounds are obtained with different interpretations of certain words.

The patients were later asked to read the texts again--only this time, silently, and to themselves. Researchers developed a special algorithm to decode just what was going on by turning the brain's activity into words.

Later, researchers even tested the decode and algorithm with Pink Floyd to determine which neurons responded to different musical notes.

For previous research, the study authors used MRI scans to monitor the blood flow in people's brains as they watched certain films, including Star Trek, Madagascar 2 and Pink Panther 2.

Based on their study of the brain's visual center and participants' response to on-screen movements, scientists created a computer program that could accurately guess what each person looked like. Furthermore, they were even able to create a moving picture similar to the previous footage played in movies.

In the future, researchers hope this and other studies can contribute to developing a device that could help paralyzed patients learn to speak again. On the other hand, could this device also help us read other people's minds, too?

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Frontiers of Neuroengineering.