Just By Imagining

An experimental device that turns thoughts into text has allowed a man who was left paralyzed by an accident to construct sentences swiftly on a computer screen.

The man was able to type with 95% accuracy just by imagining he was handwriting letters on a sheet of paper, a team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"What we found, surprisingly, is that [he] can type at about 90 characters per minute," says Krishna Shenoy of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The device would be most useful to someone who could neither move nor speak, says Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford and co-director, with Shenoy, of the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory.

"We can also envision it being used by someone who might have had a spinal cord injury who wants to use email," Henderson says, "or, say, a computer programmer who wants to go back to work."

Both Henderson and Shenoy have a proprietary interest in commercializing the experimental approach used to decode brain signals.

The idea of decoding the brain activity involved in handwriting is "just brilliant," says John Ngai, who directs the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative, which helped fund the research.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...