Brain Computer Interface Allows Completely Locked In People to Communicate
Completely locked-in participants report being ‘happy’.
The study is in PLOS Biology. (full access paywall)
As someone who has met several people with locked-in syndrome, this is absolutely marvelous news. This opens up the potential for communication and all kinds of control over their environment.
“Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words’ meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain’s outer layer.”
from the NPR article (with video):
“These maps are remarkably consistent from person to person,” says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley who led the study. The work appears in the journal Nature.
To make the language maps, Gallant’s team placed seven people in functional MRI scanners. They then played the research subjects two hours of stories from The Moth Radio Hour. Researchers looked at many pea-size areas of the brain to gauge how each responded to words. They found that words with related meanings lit up similar parts of the brain. One area responded to words related to people. Another responded to numbers.
Words meanings could pop up in different places simultaneously. Hearing the word “top” caused regions associated with clothing and appearances to light up. But “top” could also stimulate a region associated with words related to numbers and measurements.
Very interesting…It is these type of articles that show the brain’s understanding is still only at the beginning of discovery. Another example that not everything is in the textbooks we hold so dear to our facts.
“I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to rewrite the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation — and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding — that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system,” Lee said.
I have no words to describe just how ground-breaking this finding is. We’ve assumed for a long time that there was some way that the brain and the immune system were linked, but now we’ve actually found a physical pathway between the two.
Hearseeno 