People who are in a vegetative state can not move the body deliberately, can not even move the eyes.
They were considered completely unaware until Adrian Owen (now at Western University in London, Canada) scanned the human brain in a vegetative state using the fMRI scanner while asking them to imagine playing tennis.
The research team is the first to prove that some of the unconscious people are actually "there" because their thoughts and consciousness are still intact.
Tim Owen and several other teams are now trying to develop mind-read minded portable devices to help patients in those circumstances to communicate.
The size of an MRI machine can be as big as a room, so their portable device uses an EEG, ie electrodes mounted on the scalp surface in the form of a hat.
Owen's latest device design uses vibrating pads on each arm, and a person in a vegetative state is asked to pay attention to left or right pads to answer 'yes' or 'no' questions.
The drive to develop mind-reading technology attracts people outside the narrow clinical sphere. In recent years, there have been several techniques that have been developed to know what people hear, read, or, to some extent, think.
Quoted from New Scientist on Friday (9/22/2017), here are 5 ways that technology helps us:
Revealing a Meaning
In 2012, Joao Correia at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, together with his colleagues found a new way of knowing whether they could detect brain activity related to the meaning of a word.
They use bilingual volunteers and record their brain activities using the fMRI scanner when the participants hear the names of four animals, buffalo, horse, shark, and duck in English.
The researchers found distinctive patterns for each animal and found that the patterns repeated when volunteers heard the names of the animals in Dutch. It thus reveals that the concepts or meanings of words have been detected.
According to Correia, someday we will be able to understand the whole sentence right away (real time).eavesdropping on the voice of the heart
Be careful who is listening. Current brain activity can reveal what our hearts are. Certain neurons in the brain become active in responding to certain qualities in a voice, such as frequency.
In 2014, a team led by Brian Pasley of the University of California, Berkeley, developed an algorithm that can translate these neural activities to understand sounds that respond to our brain.
The researchers asked seven people who had implants on their brains for epilepsy treatment. The experiment participants were asked to read the text from the Gettysburg Address speech while their brain activity was recorded.
The researchers then used an algorithm to understand which brain patterns were related to each word.
They then asked the participants to read silently and successfully use the same algorithm to detect the words being read by the participants.
It still takes time to bring the algorithm into a device, but researchers hope they will be able to 'enter' into people who are physically unable to talk so they can communicat.Intention and Free Will
More want coffee? Imagine if we can think of it and a robot then make coffee for us. That is the implication of a brain implant that can translate the intention.
In 2015, Richard Andersen at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, together with his team performed 2 small electrode implants in the posterior parietal cortex of two study participants.
The researchers then recorded the activities of hundreds of neurons and a computer translating them. For Erik Sorto, the researchers translated his intentions into robotic arm movements.
They managed to uncover the intentions of the 2nd person when performing the game prisoner's dilemma.Music Teacher
Whether as a student or a musician, we are eager to learn with ease. Soon there will be a tool for that.
In 2016, Beste Yuksel and Robert Jacob of Tufts University in Massachusetts developed BACh, short for Brain Automated Chorales.
It helps people measure how tough their brains are at work. This is done with the use of sensors on one's forehead and measuring the oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex in the brain.
The system offers something new to learn after reading that decreased oxygen levels indicate our readiness for additional information.
The researchers tested the device on some inexperienced piano players. They are all capable of learning more quickly and precisely by using BACh.Write the Mind
In February 2017, Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center and colleagues reported that three paralyzed people had managed to type their writing using thoughts and implants on the brain.
A silicon patch is coated with hundreds of electrical sensors embedded in the primary motor cortex, the part of the brain in charge of movement.
Research participants then thought of moving certain parts of their bodies, and a computer translated the thought into motion on the screen cursor.
Within a day, the participants have learned how to control the cursor sufficiently so that it can type 8 words per minute.