11 ms·
“Neuroprosthesis” restores words to man with paralysis
- harrychin2 5y agoComatose patients would be so relieved to be able to communicate with the outside world
- djmips 5y agoA nice thought but I feel like this is more likely useful on the paralyzed. Comatose indicates minimal brain activity.
- lsiebert 5y agoNot exactly. Comas just indicate prolonged unconsciousness and inability to react (in terms of body movement) to stimuli, not minimal brain activity. https://www.brain-injury-law-center.com/blog/brain-activity-during-coma/ https://www.brain-injury-law-center.com/blog/brain-activity-... A complete lack of brain activity is brain death. Brain activity is often slowed in comatose patients, but that varies from patient to patient. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/traumatic-brain-injury/symptoms-causes/syc-20378557 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/traumatic-bra...
- schoen 5y agoI don't think that's exactly the condition you're looking for here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma
- lsiebert 5y agoA Coma is prolonged unconsciousness. These patients are awake, aware, and yet trapped in their bodies, unable to communicate. Most previous brain signal translation has been adaptions of typing in some form. This is directly translating signals intended for vocal cords, IE for vocal speech, into text.
- Animats 5y agoRequires brain surgery. But a few more generations of the technology, and people will be texting with it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 5y agoHow long before the thought crime actually is going to be a thing? Imagine poorer people will be forced to wear Facebook Talk device, that will listen to your thoughts and then project adverts directly into your eyes. They will also know when your disability check is coming and what are your desires and needs. They'll for sure show you something tempting to buy...
- lsiebert 5y agoThis isn't mental telepathy, this is using voluntary attempts to activate the vocal cords to produce text using an implanted device.
- hda2 5y ago> How long before the thought crime actually is going to be a thing? My first thoughts as well. While this iteration requires implants and a conscious effort to function, I bet a year's-worth of salary that future iterations will be able to function without either. I personally think thought crime is an inevitability at this point. I feel sorry for future generations.
- varispeed 5y agoI wonder if there will be something a step further - a device that will prevent forbidden thoughts from occurring...
- BurningFrog 5y agoThe ability to read your thoughts at some level from the outside is probably already a reality in primitive ways.
- vnchr 5y agoGoogle Brain Drive will ban “misleading thought content”.
- isatty 5y agoInteresting that this comment is downvoted - going to save this to come back to it in 10-20y for it to be absolutely the state of affairs.
- ipnon 5y agoI want Grammarly in my brain. I want to have real time speech improvement of my audible speech. If I could have a privacy respecting brain computer interface to improve my speaking and rhetoric, I would.
- purplecats 5y ago> If I could have a privacy respecting brain computer something's gotta give. and im pretty sure it'll be your privacy
- codetrotter 5y agoTrain ML model centrally, sell brain computer that runs it locally and don’t send data back. Privacy.
- ipnon 5y agoI genuinely presume this sort of transfer learning will outpace, or even prerequisite, the neural lace used to integrate it with a customer's consciousness.
- irjustin 5y agoAt which point.... is a person a person or are we all just computers? Maybe we already are all just computers in a simulation already. Ghost in the shell thoughts are rapidly coming back.
- Jorengarenar 5y agoBrains are basically analog computers made of flesh
- samplatt 5y agoA BIG portion of the "point" of the Ghost in the Shell franchise (beyond the original first movie) was the "line" between human and machine was already blurred beyond usefulness as soon as they started relying on fire and tools to build a civilisation. My take (apologies in advance for the self-indulgence): A commonly-claimed revelation or drug-assisted-insight is that "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves". This is a foundational concept in the idea that "cybernetically-assisted individuals" is only a minor extension of our current reality, the tiniest blip upon our shared planetary history's march of progress. It should be treated as such, but hopefully better managed than our previous technological accelerants like fossil fuels...
- irjustin 5y agoIncredible! This invokes the feeling that it'll be impossible to keep computers out of our bodies at some point, which is scary on so many levels. But like any tool, if I look at all the good that can come out of it - simply amazing things are possible.
- xwdv 5y agoMy muscular memory of Vim is so strong, I’d wager I could code even faster and more powerfully with a proper brain interface.
- nine_k 5y agoThis always puzzles me a but. Is it the typing speed that limits the amount and quality of code one can write in a day? To me, it's mostly finding out things about the subject area, finding the right APIs, code search. Of course, when typing is fast enough so that you never break your flow, it is important.
- Treegarden 5y agoThe whole point of vim is normal mode, not insert mode. Insert mode is just typing, but normal mode is code or file navigation. Its not about typing speed but deliberate action and precision - with vim you need only a couple of keystrokes. In this context speed refers not to typing code but to doing what you mentioned quicker (at least for code search, jump to definition, go back in cursor history) but there is vimium for the web which helps with research. My hands are slowly failing me and vim is a god send.
- czrnb 5y agoI think that in order to not break your flow, you should be able to translate your thoughts (the answer you found) to code or text as fast as possible. Typing slowly when you know what you want to write can be frustrating for one (lowering your motivation), but most importantly is too trivial a task to prevent you from thinking at the same time (and thus parasitic thoughts can break your flow). A HCI that can help you write your code as you think of it (and maybe log the thought process for future reference !) would be awesome on that front.
- melling 5y agoThrow in better prediction software, and better application support for example, https://copilot.github.com/ https://copilot.github.com/ and those 18 words can turn into a lot more
- patothon 5y agoI know this was a joke, but this is some sci-fi level plot.
- wombatmobile 5y agoThis is significant computationally in placing human thought unambiguously into the digital realm because it shows the data protocol between thought and output is machine learnable. The protocol for sensory input has likewise been prosthesised by Paul Nach-y-Rita’s tongue grid array for vision. https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Paul-Bach-y-Rita-75345859 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Paul-B... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bach-y-Rita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bach-y-Rita
- tikwidd 5y agoThat is not what is happening in this study, which is tapping into the motor system that controls the muscles used in speech. That is part of the externalisation of language, not the system of thought (which we know very little about).
- wombatmobile 5y agoYes, this is just output. And Bach-y-Rita showed Input is digital. What’s left is all the logic between input and output.
- tikwidd 5y agoYes, we have sophisticated digital systems that interface with our (analogue) sensory systems - a screen and keyboard are examples of this. Maybe these sensory interfaces involve some machine learning (maybe they don't). In the future, we might stimulate the sensory systems directly. But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" as you put it - i.e. what are the atoms of thought, how do they combine, and how these internal thoughts relate to external language. We can only meaningfully tackle these questions by linguistic theorising and experiments.
- wombatmobile 5y ago> But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" We gain a pathway for investigation backwards. What neural substrate is active in generating the speech data? Work backwards from there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eh8 5y ago> Funding: Supported by a research contract under Facebook’s Sponsored Academic Research Agreement… Big tech isn’t far away from this. Scary to think what kind of applications can be derived from this technology. Imagine a hi-tech polygraph that maps your brain activity to speech—-do you have plausible deniability if something incriminating blurts out?
- parsecs 5y agoThere are already pretty advanced methods for crime detection like that one thing where they show pictures of various objects while measuring brain activity to determine if you've seen the specific object before. Not sure if that tech is actually deployed though.
- canjobear 5y agoThis could be an excellent tool for interrogation.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoSo this means we can think about 18 words per minute? Sounds reasonable. I don't think I think any faster than that. Could there be some other ways to measure it? Like timing myself?
- schoen 5y agoYour message here was 34 words -- did it take you two minutes to think of its content?
- Stupulous 5y agoThis is a prosthetic that translates brain signals into speech at 18 wpm. Human speech is generally about 150 wpm in english. I've read that the informational output is relatively consistent between languages, so in a language like german you get bigger words and fewer wpm. Assuming that's correct, 150 english wpm is probably close to the processing speed of the brain, minus the overhead of converting thoughts to speech.
- AussieWog93 5y agoBefore we get ahead of ourselves: >The participant, who asked to be referred to as BRAVO1, worked with the researchers to create a 50-word vocabulary that Chang’s team could recognize from brain activity using advanced computer algorithms. Fifty words, that's it. For comparison, a nurse a laminated piece of A4 paper and a patient who can blink get about 15 characters per minute from the English alphabet. Great PR, but not a substantial improvement over the BCIs from the past 15 years.
- robertwt7 5y agoI still think its a good progress regardless
- AussieWog93 5y agoIt is not a substantial improvement over previous experiments from the late 00's.
- knicholes 5y agoAnd it requires a brain implant.
- op00to 5y agoIt is a substantial change in how the intended word is selected. This new process lends itself to huge amounts of training and machine learning to vastly expand the vocabulary.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>It is a substantial change in how the intended word is selected. Detecting (in)activity in M1 during imagined movement tasks has been the standard decoding method for 30+ years. >This new process lends itself to huge amounts of training and machine learning to vastly expand the vocabulary. Not without degrading accuracy. The fundamental limit to these systems is the human operator; not the decoding algorithms. ML has advanced dramatically since the turn of the century but almost all BCI performance gains have been from new sensors.
- KaiIrwin 5y agoFacebook stopped funding for it's BCI research after this.
- narrator 5y agoImagine if someone finds a zero day for that guy's prosthesis and starts putting words in his mouth.
- animanoir 5y agoThis is the kind of studies that make me feel that we are already in some kind of post-future already.
- make3 5y ago74% median decoding accuracy. Up-to 93% best performance. Is 74% decoding accuracy good in a sentence of a very small length? do we know if the misses are at least semantically close or random? It's very weird and suspicious to me that they mention the Up-To performance in the video, without any explanation or statistical quantification or context information. Sounds like they really wanna make this sound better than it is, in this video at least. (the info is likely in the paper)
- phr333k 5y agoMakes me wonder if it will work for someone that doesn't speak english or they will have to recreate a vocabulary ?
- nabla9 5y agoIt would be interesting to see followups about these people who had significant brain-computer interfaces. How long the implant stays functional, infections, life-expectancy changes. The Dobelle Eye for example. In the early 2000s Dobelle Eye brain implant allowed blind man to drive a car in a parking lot using cameras that feed video into his into the visual cortex. They had to make the operation outside the US (Lisbon) and patients had occasional seizures even then. Wired article: https://www.wired.com/2002/09/vision/ https://www.wired.com/2002/09/vision/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Dobelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Dobelle
- caycep 5y agoWhen I first saw the presentations going around regarding the recording and decoding (and reconstruction of vocal cord/oral muscle movements) the one thing I wasn't sure of was - how much of the signal was vibration artifact? Neural electrodes (at least single unit ones) tend to pick up a lot of vibration artifact which we see when people talk, cough, etc w/ those in. I guess if they are encoding and decoding voice from these...does it prove direct neural encoding/decoding from LFP/single units, if they can generate robot voice from someone who can't generate sound and thus vibrations on their own?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoDo you like our Dear Leader? - "NO" detected in brain waves - Off to the reeducation camp you go!
- mike_h 5y agoAnyone know the best legal way in the US to prevent yourself from being kept alive if you end up conscious but completely paralyzed? I know living wills can handle some medical scenarios, but I’m having trouble finding an answer on locked-in syndrome. Wondering if I’d need to form a euthanasia pact with a friend or something.
- edumucelli 5y agoImagine your phone asking "Can Google Keyboard have access to your Brain?"
- spywaregorilla 5y agoLots of hackers get excited reading about BCI, but criticize how github copilot will never be useful. BCI like this is copilot running on a particularly noisy signal from your brain. Want to code with this tech? Expect something like, if not literally, copilot.
- carlasagan 5y agoThe lab team did an AMA on r/AskScience today. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/onbs7v/askscience_ama_series_were_ucsf_neuroscientists/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/onbs7v/askscien...