Loosely Assembled

New Scientist has an interesting article about computer aided speech.

Ramsey, who suffered a brain-stem stroke at the age of 16, has an electrode implanted into a brain area that plans the movements of the vocal cords and tongue that underlie speech.

These sensors end up driving a vocal simulator, allowing Ramsey to make sounds with his mind.

I like this approach of tapping into the vocal control regions instead of the fantastical notion that you could simply tap into the “thoughts”. You could still have private thoughts, and express externally by intentionally “speaking”. It seems important to remember that computer brain interfaces will almost always have to read the signals naturally intended for output, and that a mind reading machine is still quite unlikely.

You could also hypothetically send those signals elsewhere, having them drive another device besides your own vocal simulator, you could have them broadcast around the world, sent to a voice to text translator, or simply stored as raw data on a backup drive of everything you have ever said.

Read the Neural Voice API article.

From a CCRMA final project called Sonifying & Visualizing Neural Data by Mindy Chang.

“Can we have it look at a picture? Can we have it listen to a piece of music? Can we have it show emotion? Can we have it get sick?” he says. “When you impose damage or disease, how does the virtual brain recover from a stroke? How does it deal with Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease?”

Read the article

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

In fact, just read a NewScientist story about how our brains thrive right at the edge of chaos:
CHAOTIC thinking is rarely a recipe for success, but evidence is emerging that operating at the edge of chaos may drive our brain’s astonishing capabilities.
I definitely see a connection between these two items.