For the past 200 years, human civilization has benefited from the invention of countless thousands of products that utilized electricity to illuminate, heat, or fuel them. Discovering that it is possible to harness electricity as a form of energy was a major milestone. Just imagine where we’d be today if we had been able to utilize electricity several hundred years before we made us of it in the 1800s!
Believe it or not, the human body wouldn’t be able to operate without the presence of electricity. Further, we’re better than every inanimate object put to work over the past 200-odd years that made use of electricity because humans don’t have to get electrocuted or otherwise capture electricity as a form of energy. Rather, the food we eat is transferred into electricity by our heart, brain, and nervous system. It’s entirely necessary for the brain’s synapses to relay information among one another, body to relay signals throughout and among its dozen-or-so major organ systems, and heartbeats.
Also known as brainwaves, the communication of our brain’s countless neurons is carried out through tiny pulses of electricity among them. For several decades, sleep researchers, biologists, and physicians have been able to detect brainwaves by spreading a variety of sensors all over the scalp. Each one of them is responsible for picking up on different bandwidths, or sizes of waves sent out by the brain.
Recent research from the Ivy League’s Columbia University, particularly the Neural Acoustic Processing Lab at New York City’s very own Columbia University, succeeded in forming speech from nothing but the complex patterns of various wavelengths of brainwaves that subjects’ brains emitted while they listened to a recording of a speaker.
Nima Mesgarani, one of Columbia University’s most prominent, successful neuroscientists, applied several developments they discovered from research into deep learning networks alongside the world’s latest and greatest technologies for forming speech without using the vocal cords.
The combination of technologies, referred to by the study’s researchers as a “brain-computer interface,” output its throughput into a speech synthesizer, also known as a vocoder, that was fueled by the ultra-bright intellect of artificial intelligence.
Although the final form of the speech that came out of the speech synthesizer was difficult to understand and sounded more like a robot than a human, researchers consider their study a major accomplishment.
