More than 20 years ago, humans began receiving implants that effectively connected their brains to computers in what are known as brain-computer interfaces, also referred to as direct neural interfaces, mind-machine interfaces, or neural-control interfaces, among other things.
Through these implants, not to mention the advanced software that has been developed by researchers over the past few decades to ultimately allow the recipients of such implants to utilize them, disabled people have been able to regain their sight, for example. These implants have allowed people to better read their surroundings, regaining the capabilities that they once had prior to losing their vision or other senses.
However, no computers, software, or brain-computer interfaces have been able to read people’s brains. Rather, these direct neural interfaces have only allowed people to read their surroundings.
Facebook hopes to bring the world’s first computer that’s capable of reading people’s brains – not the other way around, as mentioned above – thanks to extensive research that had been going on since at least 2017 at Facebook’s Facebook Reality Labs. Fortunately, for both Facebook and the rest of the world, Facebook is inching closer to being able to further advance brain-computer interfaces past what they’ve ever been capable of doing.
Earlier today, on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, Facebook announced its most recent update on its soon-to-be groundbreaking brain-computer interface. The update reported that a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, that is backed by Facebook Reality Labs, experienced success in recognizing and decoding human speech through the power of electrodes that were implanted directly in people’s brains.
Facebook’s update came alongside the publication of a piece of research conducted by the researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, that was published in the popular, peer-reviewed academic journal Nature Communications earlier today, which was titled “Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity.”
The aforementioned electrodes successfully notched electrical activity in portions of the human brain that are known to be responsible for the processing of speech, including both the production of speech and the breaking down of speech. The researchers deciphered a litany of patterns that were pumped out by subjects’ brains when they processed certain parts of speech.
The publication’s participants’ brain activity was observed and recorded when they both answered and asked questions. Researchers’ technology was able to predict people’s answers to a number of questions to the tune of roughly 60 to 75 percent accuracy.
