Scientists develop brain implant to turn thoughts into speech
For the first time, scientists have created a brain implant that can "hear" and vocalize words a person is only imagining in their head.
The device, developed at Stanford University in California, could help people with severe paralysis communicate more easily, even if they can't move their mouth to try to speak.
"This is the first time we've managed to understand what brain activity looks like when you just think about speaking," Erin Kunz, lead author of the study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, told the Financial Times.
"For people with severe speech and motor impairments, brain-computer interfaces capable of decoding inner speech could help them communicate much more easily and more naturally," said Kunz, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosurgery.
Four people with paralysis from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke volunteered for the study. One participant could only communicate by moving his eyes up and down for "yes" and side to side for "no."
Electrode arrays from the BrainGate brain-computer interface were implanted in the brain area that controls speech, called the motor cortex.
Participants were then asked to try speaking or to silently imagine certain words.
The device picked up brain activity linked to phonemes, the small units that make up speech patterns, and artificial intelligence software stitched them into sentences.
Imagined speech signals were weaker than attempted speech but still accurate enough to reach up to 74% recognition in real time, the research shows.
Senior author Frank Willett, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, told the Financial Times the results show that "future systems could restore fluent, rapid and comfortable speech via inner speech alone," with better implants and decoding software.
"For people with paralysis attempting to speak can be slow and fatiguing and, if the paralysis is partial, it can produce distracting sounds and breath control difficulties," Willett said.
The team also addressed privacy concerns. In one surprising finding, the BCI sometimes picked up words participants weren't told to imagine -- such as numbers they were silently counting.
To protect privacy, researchers created a "password" system that blocks the device from decoding unless the user unlocks it. In the study, imagining the phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" worked 98% of the time to prevent unintended decoding.
"This work gives real hope that speech BCIs can one day restore communication that is as fluent, natural and comfortable as conversational speech," Willett said.
More information
Learn more about the technology by reading the full study in the journal Cell.
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UPI
3 hours ago
- UPI
Scientists develop brain implant to turn thoughts into speech
Stanford University scientists have developed a brain implant designed to "hear" and vocalize words a person with severe paralysis is imagining in their mind. File Photo by Terry Schmitt/UPI | License Photo For the first time, scientists have created a brain implant that can "hear" and vocalize words a person is only imagining in their head. The device, developed at Stanford University in California, could help people with severe paralysis communicate more easily, even if they can't move their mouth to try to speak. "This is the first time we've managed to understand what brain activity looks like when you just think about speaking," Erin Kunz, lead author of the study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, told the Financial Times. "For people with severe speech and motor impairments, brain-computer interfaces capable of decoding inner speech could help them communicate much more easily and more naturally," said Kunz, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosurgery. Four people with paralysis from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke volunteered for the study. One participant could only communicate by moving his eyes up and down for "yes" and side to side for "no." Electrode arrays from the BrainGate brain-computer interface were implanted in the brain area that controls speech, called the motor cortex. Participants were then asked to try speaking or to silently imagine certain words. The device picked up brain activity linked to phonemes, the small units that make up speech patterns, and artificial intelligence software stitched them into sentences. Imagined speech signals were weaker than attempted speech but still accurate enough to reach up to 74% recognition in real time, the research shows. Senior author Frank Willett, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, told the Financial Times the results show that "future systems could restore fluent, rapid and comfortable speech via inner speech alone," with better implants and decoding software. "For people with paralysis attempting to speak can be slow and fatiguing and, if the paralysis is partial, it can produce distracting sounds and breath control difficulties," Willett said. The team also addressed privacy concerns. In one surprising finding, the BCI sometimes picked up words participants weren't told to imagine -- such as numbers they were silently counting. To protect privacy, researchers created a "password" system that blocks the device from decoding unless the user unlocks it. In the study, imagining the phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" worked 98% of the time to prevent unintended decoding. "This work gives real hope that speech BCIs can one day restore communication that is as fluent, natural and comfortable as conversational speech," Willett said. More information Learn more about the technology by reading the full study in the journal Cell. Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Scientific American
3 hours ago
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Dubbed ' generative agents,' these systems can simulate the decision-making behavior of individual humans with impressive accuracy. Late last year Isabella interviewed more than 1,000 people. Then the volunteers and their generative agents took the General Social Survey, a biennial questionnaire that has cataloged American public opinion since 1972. Their results were, on average, 85 percent identical, suggesting that the agents can closely predict the attitudes and opinions of their human counterparts. Although the technology is in its infancy, it offers a glimmer of a future in which predictive algorithms can potentially act as online surrogates for each of us. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. When I first learned about generative agents the humanist in me rebelled, silently insisting that there was something about me that isn't reducible to the 1's and 0's of computer code. Then again, maybe I was naive. The rapid evolution of AI has brought many humbling surprises. Time and again, machines have outperformed us in skills we once believed to be unique to human intelligence—from playing chess to writing computer code to diagnosing cancer. Clearly AI can replicate the narrow, problem-solving part of our intellect. But how much of your personality—a mercurial phenomenon—is deterministic, a set of probabilities that are no more inscrutable to algorithms than the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard? The question is hotly debated. An encounter with my own generative agent, it seemed to me, could help me to get some answers. The LLMs behind generative agents and chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are certainly expert imitators. People have fed texts from deceased loved ones to ChatGPT, which could then conduct text conversations that closely approximated the departed's voices. Today developers are positioning agents as a more advanced form of chatbot, capable of autonomously making decisions and completing routine tasks, such as navigating a Web browser or debugging computer code. They're also marketing agents as productivity boosters, onto which businesses can offload time-intensive human drudgery. Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Perplexity and virtually every major tech player has jumped onboard the agent bandwagon. Joon Sung Park, a leader of Stanford's generative agent work, had always been drawn to what early Disney animators called 'the illusion of life.' He began his doctoral work at Stanford in late 2020, after the COVID pandemic was forcing much of the world into lockdown, and as generative AI was starting to boom. 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Generative agents are doing 'a big slice of what a real person does, which is to reflect on their experiences, abstract out beliefs about themselves, store those beliefs and use them as cognitive tools to interpret the world,' Cervone told me. 'That's what we do all the time.' Park dropped 25 generative agents inside Smallville, a virtual space modeled on Swarthmore College, where he had studied as an undergraduate. He included basic affordances such as a café and a bar where the agents could mingle; picture The Sims without a human player calling the shots. Smallville was a petri dish for virtual sociality; rather than watching cells multiply, Park observed the agents gradually coalescing from individual nodes into a unified network. At one point, Isabella (the same agent that would later interview me), assigned with the role of café owner, spontaneously began handing out invitations to her fellow agents for a Valentine's Day party. 'That starts to spark some real signals that this could actually work,' Park told me. Yet as encouraging as those early results were, the residents of Smallville had been programmed with particular personality traits. The real test, Park believed, would lie in building generative agents that could simulate the personalities of living humans. It was a tall order. Personality is a notoriously nebulous concept, fraught with hidden layers. The word itself is rooted in uncertainty, vagary, deception: it's derived from the Latin persona, which originally referred to a mask worn by a stage actor. Park and his team don't claim to have built perfect simulations of individuals' personalities. 'A two-hour interview doesn't [capture] you in anything near your entirety,' says Michael Bernstein, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and one of Park's collaborators. 'It does seem to be enough to gather a sense of your attitudes.'And they don't think generative agents are close to artificial general intelligence, or AGI—an as-yet-theoretical system that can match humans on any cognitive task. In their latest paper, Park and his colleagues argue that their agents could help researchers understand complex, real-world social phenomena, such as the spread of online misinformation and the outcome of national elections. If they can accurately simulate individuals, then they can theoretically set the simulations loose to interact with one another and see what kind of social behaviors emerge. Think Smallville on a much bigger scale. Yet, as I would soon discover, generative agents may only be able to imitate a very narrow and simplified slice of the human personality. 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Toward the end of the Q&A, I ventured into the deep end by asking whether he believed in God. The answer wasn't far from how I might respond. 'I wasn't raised in a specific religious framework, but I've always felt a connection with something greater than myself, especially when I'm in nature,' my agent wrote. 'It's like there's a kind of transcendent energy or consciousness that we can tap into.' Most memorably, there were moments that felt like genuine insight. I had had a long, stressful few months. I had started working as a full-time freelance writer last October, ushering in a period of professional freedom but also chronic uncertainty. I'd spent much of the winter hunkered down, reading and writing, in my small New York City apartment, and I was feeling the psychological effects of prolonged isolation. Embracing the spirit of spring, I had resolved to make what I believed would be some healthy changes, starting with a greater effort to maintain a better work-life balance. 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It had captured a veneer of my personality, but it was just that: a virtual actor playing a role, wearing my data as a mask. At no point did I get the feeling that I was interacting with a system that truly captured my voice and my thoughts. But that isn't the point. Generative agents don't need to sound like you or understand you in your entirety to be useful, just as psychologists don't need to understand every quirk of your behavior to make broad-stroke diagnoses of your personality type. Adam Green, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University, who studies the impacts of AI on human creativity, believes that that lack of specificity and our growing reliance on a handful of powerful algorithms could filter out much of the color and quirks that make each of us unique. Even the most advanced algorithm will revert to the mean of the dataset on which it's been trained. 'That matters,' Green says, 'because ultimately what you'll have is homogenization.' In his view, the expanding ubiquity of predictive AI models is squeezing our culture into a kind of groupthink, in which all our idiosyncrasies slowly but surely become discounted as irrelevant outliers in the data of humanity. After meeting my generative agent, I remembered the feeling I had back when I spoke with Isabella—my inner voice that had rejected the idea that my personality could be re-created in silicon or, as Meghan O'Gieblyn put it in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, 'that the soul is little more than a data set.' I still felt that way. If anything, my conviction had been strengthened. I was also aware that I might be falling prey to the same kind of hubris that once kept early critics of AI from believing that computers could ever compose decent poetry or outmatch humans in chess. But I was willing to take that risk.
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Eli Lilly's 170% UK price hike for Mounjaro is just the start as pharma firms bow to Trump's pricing pressures
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