"Electrodes in brain pick up faint ‘inner voice’ signal by probing intersection of speech and movement
12.07.2024
Russian researchers from Skoltech, the Federal Centre of Neurosurgery in Tyumen, Sechenov University, and Lomonosov Moscow State University have conducted a study of brain activity in two patients with electrodes implanted in their brains, while they performed speech-related and handwriting tasks. Available on the medRxiv preprint repository, the team’s findings are essential to building a body of knowledge that would eventually enable “mind-reading” neural interfaces that could identify the user’s thoughts and recognize unspecified intentions without being primed to any particular task.
...
One exciting conclusion is: Seeing how a function tends to be distributed throughout the brain, can we pick up its electrical activity and determine what it’s trying to do without knowing in advance what kind of an intention we are looking for?” This question underlies the notion of so-called multimodal neural interfaces. These are brain chips that are not geared toward one particular function the way most state-of-the-art devices are.