Things keep getting better and better actually with each article I write today, which gets my disposition to higher levels. The "thing" I have tripped off now is the Neuralynx System. You can see the schematic, to your left, but don't stress it too much if you don't understand it - I don't, well at least not completely, yet.

Needless to say, this is not a rumor, and definitely not science fiction, since the researchers tried this on a paralyzed 26-year-old and it worked. What it does is actually translate the person's thoughts into spoken English, by connecting to the neurons, and sending signals wirelessly to a laptop that, with proprietary software, is capable of translating the brain activity into spoken English.

There's only one problem, as of yet, researchers need to insert electrodes into the patient's brain, install signal amplifiers and transmitters under the scalp, which, come to think about it, completely gives me the goose bumps, but I know that they will eventually get things a lot more compact, and hopefully skip the brain surgery part.

Now, let us inspect the research paper a little bit, so as to find out that the circuitry, powered by an induction electric supply, transmits the signals to the laptop via FM radio (that would be nasty, to actually hear your thoughts on the radio), and then the software converts the analog signal into digital data that the neural decoder interprets into speech commands, and finally sent to the synthesizer.

All of this process takes about 50 milliseconds that, according to scientists, is the same amount of time an average person takes to do the same process, using their nerves, vocal chords and mouth. The leader of the Neuralynx project, Frank Guenther, of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University, also said that the system would be optimized. The benefits of such a system, you can all relate to, as well as the downsides of such technology.


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