Mind-reading Brain Implant Could Allow Paralysed to Turn Their Thoughts Into Instant Speech

A revolutionary new device that reads a person’s thoughts and turns them into speech could soon change the lives of paralysed patients around the world.

The Neuralynx System is being developed by a team of scientists led by Professor Frank Guenther at Boston University.

Users will simply have to think of what they want to say and a voice synthesizer will translate the thoughts into speech almost immediately.

The patient had a stroke in the brain, which stopped neural signals from travelling through the body. The electrode bypassed these channels and sent the thought signals to an FM receiver outside the body to a speech synthesizer via a neural decoder

They have tested the device on a patient who has ‘locked-in syndrome’, after a stroke stopped neural signals travelling from his brain to the rest of his body.

The rare condition means the person is aware and awake, but cannot move or communicate due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes. Read more …