‘Mind-reaching machine’ turns your thoughts into speech

This innovation could help those with motor diseases.

Professor Robert Knight and his team at UC Berkeley have been studying how hearing words, speaking out loud and imagining words involves brain areas that overlap.

‘Now, the challenge is to reproduce comprehensible speech from direct brain recordings done while a person imagines a word they would like to say,’ said Knight, who is also the Founding Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Knight says the goal of the device is to help people affected by motor disease such as paralysis and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

‘There are many neurological disorders that limit speech despite patients being fully aware of what they want to say,’ Knight said.

‘We want to develop an implantable device that decodes the signals that occur in the brain when we think about a word, then turn these signals into a sound file that can be reproduced by a speech device.’

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.