Stephen Hawking To Demonstrate Speech Directly From His Thoughts Next Month

 Brain-Computer Interfaces

At the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge next month, the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and Dr. Philip Low of Stanford University's School of Medicine, will demonstrate how a non-invasive portable scanner can be used to formulate speech by tracking certain electrical patterns in the brain.

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists alive today, but his ability to communicate his thoughts with the rest of us has declined steadily over the years due to a motor neurone disease (ALS).

Hawking, author of the popular science works,The Grand Design and A Brief History of Time is now almost completely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device.

Now researchers want to hack into his brain activity, and attempt to read his thoughts directly.

The device they plan to use is called the iBrain from NeuroVigil, and it has been developed by professor Philip Low at Stanford University to measure electrical brain activity with an unprecedented level of detail.

Professor Low anticipates that by measuring Hawking's intense brain activity while he thinks about performing tasks such as moving his arms and legs, they can develop a roadmap of where to look when trying to measure similar brain activity in the rest of us.

For transhumanists and Singulatarians, the device also represents the potential to upload thoughts directly to a computer.

"During the attempted movements, the subject's brain activity demonstrated distinct broad-spectrum pulses extending to the Gamma and ultra-high Gamma ranges. Such pulses were present in the absence of actual movement and absent when the subject was not attempting motion," the conference schedule states.

"The emergence of such high bandwidth biomarkers opens the possibility to link intended movements to a library of words and convert them into speech, thus providing ALS sufferers with communication tools more dependent on the brain than on the body."

Low and Hawking have been working on the iBrain for over a year, and they plan to demonstrate it live at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on July 7 in Cambridge.



SOURCE  DVICE 

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