Russian researchers have implanted electrodes inside the skull of two patients, to study brain activity when writing and speaking in an attempt to "read minds."
The study included two patients with epilepsy who had previously had electrodes implanted in their brains for medical reasons at the Federal Center for Neurosurgery of the Russian Ministry of Health in Tyumen, where in this way, doctors search for the source of epileptic activity.
In the first task, patients wrote numbers on a tablet, and in the second, they first pronounced the words out loud, then said them silently (moving their lips) and finally just imagined pronouncing the words, without any movement of the tongue, lips, etc., and all this time, a continuous recording was made for brain activity from electrodes.
The scientists found that during writing, a motor task and non-local activity were recorded, and the signal was received by all electrodes, regardless of their location.
Scientists noted that coordination of movements is accompanied by the distribution of activity throughout the cerebral cortex, not focusing on one point, and in some specific areas of the brain, activity was observed during speaking and writing, and it turned out that the patterns of electrical activity during full speech and during "silent" pronunciation were similar.
The researchers explained that by identifying the specific location where electrical activity is generated in the brain, it is possible to identify a person's intentions.
"Any attempt to record a signal from the inner voice is interesting in itself because, in a sense, you read minds," said the lead author of the scientific work, a junior researcher at the Vladimir Zelman Center for Neurobiology and Neurorehabilitation.
According to scientists, their discovery expands the knowledge base necessary to create intelligent neural interfaces (brain chips) that can recognize the user's intentions without knowing in advance whether he wants to make a movement, write a text, or perform another task.
Neural interfaces are used in medicine to facilitate the rehabilitation of people with disorders of the nervous system, and to create augmented reality and control smart prosthetics.