Translating Brain Waves to Reconstruct Sounds and Conversations You've Heard
Reconstructing Words The top shows a spectrogram of six isolated words (deep, jazz, cause) and pseudo-words (fook, ors, nim) presented to an individual participant. At the bottom, the speech segments have been reconstructed based on readings from a set of electrodes attached to the patient's brain. PLoS BiologyResearchers see a way to eavesdrop on our brains As you listened to your colleagues' conversations at work today, or to a podcast on the train home, or to your personal trainer shouting lift, your brain completed some complex tasks. The frequencies of syllables and whole words were decoded and given meaning, and you could make sense of the language-filled world we live in without actively thinking about it. Now a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley has figured out how to map some of these cortical computations. It's a major step toward understanding how we hear - and a...