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February 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) — Scientists may one day be
able to read the minds of people who have lost the ability to speak, new
research suggests.
In their report, published in the Jan. 31 online edition of the
journal PLoS Biology, University of California, Berkeley
researchers describe how they have found a way to analyze a person’s brain
waves in order to reconstruct words the person hears in normal
conversation.
This ability to decode electrical activity in an area of the auditory
system called the superior temporal gyrus may one day enable
neuroscientists to hear the imagined speech of stroke or other patients
who can’t speak, or to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologues that
run through people’s minds, the researchers explained in a journal news
release.
“This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms
because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease [amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis] and can’t speak,” Robert Knight, a professor of psychology and
neuroscience, said in the news release. “If you could eventually
reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of
people could benefit.”
However, the study’s first author, post-doctoral researcher Brian
Pasley, noted that “this research is based on sounds a person actually
hears, but to use this for a prosthetic device, these principles would
have to apply to someone who is imagining speech.”
He explained that “there is some evidence that perception and imagery
may be pretty similar in the brain. If you can understand the relationship
well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either
synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the
words with a type of interface device.”
For the study, Pasley’s team tested two different computational models
that were designed to match spoken sounds to the pattern of activity in
the electrodes when a patient heard a single word. The better of the two
models reproduced a sound that was close enough to the original word so
that the researchers could correctly guess the word.
The aim of the research was to reveal how the human brain encodes
speech, and to then pinpoint the aspects of speech that are necessary for
understanding.
“At some point, the brain has to extract away all that auditory
information and just map it onto a word, since we can understand speech
and words regardless of how they sound,” Pasley said. “The big question
is, what is the most meaningful unit of speech? A syllable, [or an even
smaller unit of language, such as the sound of each letter]? We can test
these hypotheses using the data we get from these recordings.”
More information
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has more about adults speech and language difficulties.
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