Reading people's minds seems to be a superpower that only exists in movies. But scientists have now made it possible to translate people's brain waves!
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco developed a new device. It can turn brain waves into words on a screen in front of the user. In the study, they tested it with a paralyzed (瘫痪) man.
"To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding (破译) of full words from the brain of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak." said Edward Chang, the senior author of the study. Each year, thousands of people lose the ability to speak due to accidents or diseases. With up to 93 percent accuracy(准确性), the new device shows "strong promise" to let these people fully communicate in the future.
One problem with such mind-reading machines, however, is that they have to put electrodes into people's brains.
It's inconvenient and has health risks. But scientists from the University of Texas, US, have taken steps to change this. They tried to translate people's thoughts without even touching their heads, reported Live Science.
The new brain scanning technique is called FMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. It's a safer way of "reading" brain activity. Active brain cells have more oxygen. By tracking this, scientists can translate brain activity.
The team asked participants to listen to 16 hours of radio shows while scanning their brains. Then they used a computer algorithm (算法) to create a story based on the FMRI recording. It matched the radio shows pretty well.
In other tests, the algorithm could basically explain the story of a silent movie that the participants watched. It could even retell a story that the participants imagined in their heads. Although it's not a word-for-word translation, the technique provides many possibilities.
