
Paralyzed Man Uses Brain Implant to Type Eight Words per Minute - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/new-record-for-typing-by-brain-paralyzed-man-uses-brain-implant-to-type-8-words-per-minute
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rendaw
I'm impressed they get that much accuracy from the motor cortex. I posted
this[1] before - I imagine detecting signals at the spinal cord would provide
even greater accuracy (not necessarily in this case). I'm really excited
either way.

I'd like to know more about the implanted array though. My impression was that
all arrays induce scarring and lose effectiveness over time.

Also, isn't paralysis in ALS caused by the death of motor neurons? If that's
so, what exactly was the array sampling? Is it just that there's too few
neurons to control muscles, but still enough to type?

[1]
[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2014.00062/full)

~~~
poizan42
> A motor neuron (or motoneuron) is a nerve cell (neuron) whose cell body is
> located in the spinal cord and whose fiber (axon) projects outside the
> spinal cord to directly or indirectly control effector organs, mainly
> muscles and glands.

The neurons in the motor cortex are not motor neurons.

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got2surf
I wonder if after training, these paralyzed users would develop a sort of
language of brain primitives (almost a "thought alphabet") which are easily
recognizable by the software and easy signals for the human brain to create.
It may vary by user, but I wonder what the general set of easy "letters" would
look like.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I doubt we have the signal fidelity for that. These are just electrodes that
detect voltage changes. They can't see 'thoughtwaves' or somesuch. They see
very basic information and with a little training you can set off a voltage
threshold. These voltages are really aggregates and the tools used here just
aren't granular enough to be very exacting. You can do this right now at home
with the Neurosky headset or the Neurosky Jedi game. The former comes with a
programmable API. The stuff in clinical labs isn't typically more complex than
this. This team went with an implant which is going to provide a higher level
of accuracy, but its not going to read thoughtforms directly.

I imagine there's a more efficient way to handle typing for these low
bandwidth cases. Maybe chording of common syllables. The layout in the article
looks inefficient. You can probably lose accuracy in text to have easier
'speaking.' If you wanted to say 'father' you'd have to hunt and peck six
letters. With chording you could click on 'fa' and 'der' and it should be
understandable via context. Toss in some predictive logic and you can chord
words at once or even entire sentences. Probably easier said than done, of
course.

~~~
hatsunearu
It's like having an SDR next to a digital computer pickup unintentional
emissions to guess what the computer is doing, except the computer isn't
designed by anyone and the design isn't understood _at all_ yet.

It's a miracle every time someone manages to put the signals together to get
something meaningful done.

~~~
analogist
As a neuroengineer working in the field, this is quite accurate. Understanding
the compute architecture goes a loooong way - after all, acoustic RSA key
extraction
([https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/](https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/))
is possible. Whereas we're not exactly even sure how the brain is supposed to
theoretically compute, other than that it's tremendously parallelized to a
degree we don't quite fathom. The electronics explosion has primarily come out
of computational motifs that rely on the lightspeed resolution of
semiconductor gates and heavily rely on sequential processing, but the brain
doesn't work this way AT ALL.

An important concept here is the 100-steps-rule
([https://www.teco.edu/~albrecht/neuro/html/node7.html](https://www.teco.edu/~albrecht/neuro/html/node7.html))
- neurons are SLOW! You can out-jog most non-myelinated neural signals, and
the vast majority of sensory and motor computations finish in the order of 100
"clock cycles".

Write me a computer vision algorithm that has enough parallelism to complete
in 100 cycles, and we can talk about understanding the biological brain
compute structure and true brain-computer interfaces.

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inlineint
It seems that something like entropy-based helpers that predict probabilities
of next letters and make those letters large could increase input speed. One
of the first examples of such helper was done in David McKay lab:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_\(software\))
.

~~~
monsieurbanana
Nowadays everybody has something akin in their pockets: a smartphone keyboard.

Or at least KeySwift (but pretty sure stock android and ios have the same
feature) does it:

Instead of having to press a specific letter, you can miss and press another
close letter. For exemple if I want to write "hello" but I type instead
"hekki" it correctly proposes "hello" as correction.

Same for "trsnskstd" and "translate", "ajithdr" and "another".

So instead of having 26 letters to press, you could make for example 6 groups
of 4-5 letters, and let the computer decide which word you wanted to type.

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csomar
Am I the only one freaked out by the privacy implications of such
advancements?

I mean it's great for the disabled. But if we don't have a good privacy
protection legislation, is it possible in the future that you'll be asked for
an inspection of your brain?

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noarchy
>But if we don't have a good privacy protection legislation, is it possible in
the future that you'll be asked for an inspection of your brain?

I can already see this kind of thing being abused at border crossings. Borders
seem to be a no-man's land, where civil liberties are concerned, so even
_with_ privacy protections, I'd expect them to not apply there.

~~~
dukeluke
Extensive training and adjustment is required to use this, and that will
likely always be the case.

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flukus
I hope they make a vim plugin for the software.

Edit - This was a joke, but I do wonder if command/movement style interfaces
would be much better for this type of thing than a keyboard interface.

~~~
anaptdemise
My hand is cramping... I volunteer to write the emacs one first.

But really, this is something I dream about as a spinal disease survivor.

~~~
flukus
You don't have a foot pedal?
([https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches))

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Tepix
It's so incredibly low-bandwidth! Currently, there are basically two ternary
inputs we get from the brain. Lots of work ahead...

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lordnacho
I wonder the future holds for this type of technology. I presume this is going
to start out expensive. Perhaps one day some firm will offer for you to have
this for things like Alexa. But you'll have to have advertising beamed into
your mind. And law enforcement will be challenged about whether the data
acquired through this is admissable.

~~~
brokenmasonjars
Headon! Apply directly to the forehead!

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baq
neural lace one step (out of a billion) closer.

i'm amazed how fast some sci-fi ideas drop the fi part these days.

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hartator
Still better than the new Macbook pro keyboard!

