Speak your mind... literally!

One of the most important aspects of any exchange or interaction between people is our ability to communicate verbally. Our body and facial expressions can indicate general feelings or reactions, but our spoken language is what allows us to express exactly what we think or feel. If speaking is the best and most efficient form of human communication, then aren't certain people, whether paralyzed, mute, or suffering from laryngitis, at a major disadvantage when it comes to communicating with the world around them? Perhaps they are now, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, claim that one day people who are unable to speak, for whatever reason, may be able to literally speak their mind.

Essentially, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have decrypted the activity in the brain's temporal lobe, which is the part of the brain utilized when hearing a conversation. 15 patients who were already scheduled to undergo brain surgery volunteered to be part of this study. These patients, in some cases, already had 256 electrodes covering their temporal lobe to pinpoint the seizures they experience. Brian Pasley visited each person and recorded their brain activity using the electrodes as they listened to about 5 to 10 minutes of conversation. Different words stimulate different parts of the brain, so hearing a sentence with multiple words would result in multiple brain patterns.  These scientists were able to correlate between various words and brain activity to anticipate the words a test subject heard only by examining the temporal lobe activity.

The next step is finding a correlation between hearing a word and imagining one. Pasley says that the same principles used to reconstruct conversations that people hear must be applied to their internal verbalizations, and some evidence does exist that hearing a sound and imagining a sound stimulate similar areas of the brain. If we were able to find a correlation between imagining a word and hearing it, scientists could potentially predict what we are thinking based on our brain patterns.

Technology like this has its pros and cons. A pro would certainly be the thousands of people who would benefit from having technology that could understand the words they imagine, and maybe one day play it back instantly for others to hear. Scientists would be able to give silenced people a voice.

The cons, however, cannot be ignored. If we are able to essentially read someone's thoughts, wouldn't we violate the one thing that everyone has to themselves? What about using brain activity to record an imagined confession from a suspect, or someone simply has a stray but private thought that is then recorded and taken from them. How would the technology be able to distinguish from imagined words that someone wants to keep to themselves and imagined words someone wants to express? While this is an exciting prospect, it has ethical ramifications that should not be ignored. If this technology develops more in the future, guidelines and regulations will need to be drafted and enforced to protect people from having their thoughts taken from them.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/plos-sdb012612.php