Ever wanted to know what’s going on inside someone’s head? Well, new brain-computer interface (BCI) technology can supposedly decode our private inner thoughts.
New research published in Cell by college researchers across the United States has discovered a novel way to decipher our innermost thoughts.
While BCIs like Elon Musk’s Neuralink have helped people with paralysis, this group of researchers said that there’s also been discussion regarding the use of BCIs to reveal our inner monologues.
BCIs are a minute collection of microelectrodes surgically implanted into a person’s brain to record neurological patterns.
These patterns and signals are then transferred to a computer algorithm that translates them into actions such as speech or computer cursor movements, the Stanford Medicine News Center reports.
Inner voice, or that “little voice inside your head,” is experienced by almost everyone and has been described as a silent expression that follows a coherent linguistic pattern.
The researchers found that the “little voice inside your head” is represented in the motor cortex, which is responsible for “sending signals to direct the body’s movement, as per the National Institute of Health, and these muscle movements also help to produce speech.
Through this experiment, researchers found that “imagined sentences can be decoded in real time.”
They also found that parts of free-form inner speech can be decoded during tasks like sequence recall and counting.
Researchers discovered this by analyzing microelectrode recordings – which measure electrical activity in the brain – from four participants during a “range of verbal speech behaviors.”
All four participants were “severely dysarthric,” meaning that they struggled to speak due to having disorders such as ALS and a condition called pontine stroke.
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