Dr. Andrew Anderson, a researcher at the University of Rochester, claims that he and his team are developing a technology that will mainly help those who have suffered brain attacks and now have speech problems.
Not now, not next year, but this kind of research may eventually help individuals who have problems with producing language, including those who suffer from traumatic brain injuries or strokes.
They discovered that they can predict brain activities much more precisely if they were done by chance. Cerebral Cortex published the study of British scientists and the invented technology, based on the magnetic resonance imaging technique, has already been used to scan the brains of 14 people, while they read 240 different sentences.
Thus, the specialists looked for neural models associated with certain words in the sentences and used them to create a so-called "neural dictionary" and later used the obtained system to predict what the participants could have thought of during the experiment.
As examples, the word "coffee" has 65 attributes that trigger impulses in the brain. In an attempt to solve the problem, the individuals participating in the study were also asked to associate 242 words with 65 attributes, such as "color", "noisy", "pleasant" or "time". The technology was thus able to associate, for example, the word "play" with "movement", because this activity implies... movement.
Together, we then took that approach in a new direction, by going beyond individual words to entire sentences.
Also, in order to fully predict the sentences that were to be formulated with the help of some terms, the British specialists managed to recreate associations between certain brain activities and the formulation of some words. Another example, the system was able to predict the sentence "The family is playing on the beach", even before the analyzed person formulated it.
