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When people listened to questions from a predetermined set and spoke a response from a group of answer options, a computer program could correctly predict the question based on their brain activity most of the time, researchers report today (July 30) in Nature Communications.
The study, conducted on three people who had arrays of electrodes temporarily implanted in their brains to monitor their brain activity in preparation for surgery for epilepsy, was funded by Facebook and carried out at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
“This is the first time this approach has been used to identify spoken words and phrases,” coauthor David Moses tells The Guardian. “It’s important to keep in mind that we achieved this using a very limited vocabulary, but in future studies we hope to increase the flexibility as well as the accuracy of what we can translate.”
After training on ...
