[0:09]Not being able to communicate is so frustrating and demoralizing. It is like you are trapped. Communication is so important to our everyday lives. Something as simple as I have an itch or I'm thirsty or I love you. Imagine not being able to say things to the people that you care about most in your life. A brain computer interface is a device that records brain signals from people that are paralyzed and then translates those brain signals to allow people to communicate. So this research is happening as part of a clinical trial called BrainGate2. The idea is people living with conditions like spinal cord injury, brain stem stroke or ALS undergo surgical implantation of electrodes into their motor cortex. And thereafter they work with a scientific team to develop next generation technologies to help people living with paralysis. I recently implanted a 45-year-old man with ALS who really can't be understood when he tries to speak very easily. And by using a BCI, we can translate his desire to speak and have words appear on the screen. In essence, what we're doing is we're bypassing the injury. We are recording from the source, from this part of the brain that's trying to send these commands to the muscles. And we're translating those patterns of brain activity into the phonemes, so that's like a syllable, the unit of speech, and then the words that they're trying to say. Not only can we accurately decode the words that he's reading prompted off of a screen, but we can also accurately predict what he's trying to say in free form conversation. A lot of the demonstrations of BCI technology over the past few decades took weeks or months to get working. The first time he tried to use the system, it just worked. Okay. Ready? Hello. That first time that he tried to speak and that word appeared on the screen, What good is that?
[2:18]Everyone, we had to pause, we stopped the rest of that block of experiment trials. Everyone composed themselves and like, all right, let's do it again. And it kept working. So yeah, it was, it was really special, it was a special moment. At this point, we can decode what he's trying to say about 97% of the time, which is better than a lot of commercially available smartphone applications that try to interpret your voice, which hover around 95%. This is by far the most accurate decoding ever reported. So it's not that we're uh, reading people's minds, we're not detecting their inner thought or their inner monologue or even their sort of their mind's voice. We're really detecting their attempt to move their muscles and to talk. People who do not have the ability to communicate well or quickly are often isolated and lonely. Having something like this will give them hope and opportunity to be more of themselves. We've actually used artificial intelligence to mimic his own voice. The easiest way to protect ourselves from mercury pollution is to limit our consumption. By using video recordings that were collected prior to him having ALS, we're able to digitally reconstruct his voice. So now, when he tries to speak, not only do words appear on the screen, but it sounds like him. It feels a lot like me.
[3:42]It makes people cry who have not heard me in a while. I think we're at a point where it does work well enough that it really lets him just be a part of society and to talk. I am able to still work full-time for climate action, and I am able to do that well and more efficiently with this device. Honestly, the reason this is so transformative is because it provides hope for people living with these kinds of diseases. That as they face their disease, that they know that they will hopefully have the ability to retain communication. I hope that we are at a time when everyone who is like me, have the same opportunity as I do, to have a device like this that will help them communicate. Let's all make that happen, okay.
