Brain Chips

Did you know that computers are already reading minds?

Neuroscientists at the BrainGate consortium made history in 2012, when they inserted a chip in the mind of a person with an amputated arm, allowing him to control a robotic arm with his brain. In 2017, the team developed a thought-to-text system that allowed monkeys to “think” at a computer and have the computer transcribe their thoughts at the rate of 12 words per minute. Later the same year, a similar chip was installed in several people suffering from severe paralysis, allowing them to type on a computer screen at a rate of about eight words a minute.

That was the precursor to installing two sensors, each about the size of a baby aspirin, each with 100 hair-fine electrodes, into the brain of a man who had suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed below the shoulders. The sensors picked up his neural signals, which were processed by a computer to decode his brain activity, allowing him to write words on the computer screen at the record-breaking speed of 16 words a minute—about three-quarters of the speed that people achieve when typing on their smartphones. He used the ‘greater than’ symbol on his mental typewriter to denote spaces between words.

Neuroscience still has a way to go before we are reading each others’ minds. The new mental interface requires a specialized high-performance computer, and a technician to set up the brain-computer interface and run the software. And, of course, it requires brain surgery to insert the sensory devices. But scientists believe that we are on the edge of creating a version of the technology that would be always available to the user who wanted to type, control the computer, perhaps even neurologically communicate with others who have a similar chip. Pets with a similar insertion (remember the monkey) might be able to have more personal communication connections with their adopted families.

Source:
https://gizmodo.com/using-just-his-thoughts-paralyzed-man-texts-at-a-recor-1846877072?utm