14 DAY TRIAL // Experts at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Florida, announce that electrode implants have been used for the first time to hack into a person's brain, and reveal what they are thinking about. The team says that its test subjects, all of which had electrodes inside their brains, were able to type up a virtual letter by simply focusing their attention on the same letter, displayed on a computer screen. The ultimate goal in this line of research is to develop a brain-machine interface, which was hailed as the ultimate frontier some time ago, LiveScience reports.
The investigation builds on recent work by other science groups around the world, which have demonstrated that brain scans can be used to figure out what number people were thinking about, or to pull the equivalent of video recordings from test subject's minds. Ultimately, scientists believe, people will become able to communicate with each other using their thoughts alone. The new research was conducted on two epilepsy patients, who had electrodes attached straight to the surface of their brains, in a procedure known as a craniotomy.
The role of the electrodes was to record the electrical impulses that passed between nerve cells, as commands, thoughts and other mental processes went on inside the patients. Mayo Clinic neurologist Jerry Shih, the lead investigator of the team, says that having electrodes attached directly to the surface of the brain will aid with the precision of the recordings. Most similar studies are conducted via electroencephalograms (EEG), where the electrodes are placed over the skull, and readings are not that strong or precise.
“The scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal, rather like how the Earth's atmosphere blurs the light from stars. That's why progress to date on developing these kinds of mind interfaces has been slow,” Shih explains. He adds that the study itself was very simple. The two patients were asked to watch an array of letters on a small screen in front of them. Every time one of them flashed, they were to focus their attention on that particular letter. By tweaking the signal from the electrodes to each patient's brain waves, the Mayo Clinic team was able to make the letters in the grid appear on a computer screen, directly from the mind of their study subjects.
“We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy. While this is comparable to other researchers' results with EEGs, this approach is more localized and can potentially provide a faster communication rate. Our goal is to find a way to effectively and consistently use a patient's brain waves to perform certain tasks,” Shih says.