Mind Reading Is Possible

Though in its infancy, scientists have picked up fragments of people's thoughts by decoding the brain activity caused by words that they hear. The work paves the way for brain implants that could monitor a person's thoughts and speak words and sentences as they imagine them. In the long run, it can possibly be used to interrogate criminals.

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251.g001

Spoken language is a uniquely human trait. The human brain has evolved computational mechanisms that decode highly variable acoustic inputs into meaningful elements of language such as phonemes and words. Unraveling these decoding mechanisms in humans has proven difficult, because invasive recording of cortical activity is usually not possible. In this study, researchers take advantage of rare neurosurgical procedures for the treatment of epilepsy, in which neural activity is measured directly from the cortical surface and therefore provides a unique opportunity for characterizing how the human brain performs speech recognition. Using these recordings, they asked what aspects of speech sounds could be reconstructed, or decoded, from higher order brain areas in the human auditory system. They found that continuous auditory representations, for example the speech spectrogram, could be accurately reconstructed from measured neural signals. Reconstruction quality was highest for sound features most critical to speech intelligibility and allowed decoding of individual spoken words. The results provide insights into higher order neural speech processing and suggest it may be possible to readout intended speech directly from brain activity.

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Pasley BN, David SV, Mesgarani N, Flinker A, Shamma SA, et al. (2012). Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex. PLoS Biol 10(1): e1001251. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251