Scientists have made "significant" strides in the field of reading people's minds. According to New York Post, researchers from California were able to decode the thoughts of participants into words with 79 per cent accuracy. The device has been developed by Caltech's T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Centre and will help patients with speech and non-verbal disorders. These 'speech decoders' act as brain-machine interface and capture brain activity during inner speech and translate it into language. The technology is making news because of its high accuracy.
The study has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.
For the study, the team of researchers implanted tiny devices in specific areas of the brains of two participants. The devices then read signals from the brain, translated and converted "into text in real time", said the study.
The participants were asked to think of words like 'spoon', 'python' or 'battlefield'. These thoughts were then translated in real time.
"We captured neural activity associated with internal speech - words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output," the team wrote.
The device was able to decode different internal speech strategies including reading the word silently and visualising the object the word depicts.
The region of the brain that Caltech team used was supramarginal gyrus - a crucial component for the understanding and processing of language.
The technology works according to the same principle as other brain-machine-interface devices such as Elon Musk's Neuralink.
In 2023, the University of Texas in Austin successfully used artificial intelligence-powered decoders to accurately analyse a person's brain activity. The non-invasive procedure was done through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) readings.
