The Machine That Reads Your Mind (Kinda) and Talks (Sorta)
Edward Chang keeps a cybernetic implant at his desk, which seems almost calculatedly cool. “Our job has been to understand how that electrical activity, that code of information that’s transmitted by electrical signals in the brain, actually gives rise to speech.” For going on a decade, researchers around the world have been working on this problem—trying to understand the brain’s native tongue, so to speak, and restore a voice to people with paralysis or illness, people who can imagine themselves speaking but can’t actually do it. If someone has intractable, frequent ones, Chang’s team opens up their skull and puts the array onto their brain to find the source of the seizures and, ideally, make a surgical fix. Still, despite the seeming ubiquity of functional magnetic resonance imagery in stories about “the part of the brain that controls X,” scientists don’t really know what’s going on in there. So neural interfaces like the ones Chang uses—deployed in the past to allow physically paralyzed people to control computers—offer an opportunity for more detailed “electrocorticography,” reading the activity of the brain more directly.
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