Mind Reader: Computer program translates your thoughts into speech

Wouldn't it be great if comatose patients and other people incapable of speech can talk again? It's one of the medical innovations we'd all love to see happen in the future. Sure, we're far from seeing that happen in reality, but a team of scientists from the University of California in Berkeley believes they've achieved the first step.

In the video above, you can hear random words repeated three times each. The last one always sounds like the theatrical voice of a monster or a ghost in a horror flick, but it's something else that's speaking — the human brain. With more than a little help from a computer, that is.

The UC Berkeley scientists attached hundreds of electrodes to the brains of 15 patients undergoing surgery for brain tumors or epilepsy. The electrodes were monitored by a computer with a special program that can decode their activities. The voices you heard in the video were of other people talking to the patients. The brain waves from the patients were then translated back into sounds by the computer.

While many are concerned that this kind of technology could be used to eavesdrop on other's thoughts, it has immense potential in medicine. Obviously, it needs to be refined a lot more, and the scientists may need to work on the audio output so people don't sound like creatures from another world. But in the future, they hope to create a device based on the technology that can be easily implanted into patients.

[via Daily Mail, BBC]

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