A proof-of-concept neural brain implant providing speech
67 comments
·June 29, 2025x187463
AnotherGoodName
Even without this device there's been some consideration to the thought that the conscious brain is merely an observer since it appears to activate after the unconscious brain takes actions. You just go along with what the unconscious mind did in actions and speech and you convince yourself you meant to do that after the fact.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3746176/
So here it could indeed just fire off speech and you know what? We'd probably convince ourselves that we absolutely meant to do that. In fact it could be a very interesting experiment (with willing participants). Mess with the inputs the device receives so it's not really the person activating it, let it do it's thing and see if they notice when they do/don't have control of it.
simplify
Even though the conscious brain doesn't always directly control motor skills, I wouldn't call it "merely an observer". It's your consciousness that decides your goals and beliefs; the rest of the body "learns" those things and is then preconditioned to react accordingly.
But they are separate systems. Harsh experiences (traumas) can teach your body some bad lessons in such a way that not even your conscious mind can overcome. In these situations, you can't "think your way out" of these traumatic consequences in, say, a talk therapy session; you need to deal with the body directly/somatically to recover instead.
lambdaone
I find this simultaneously fascinating and disturbing; once you have someone using this, they become a hitherto-impossible human-AI hybrid, where their mind is now a fusion between the two, completely unnoticed to the user.
stronglikedan
Funny, I was just pondering this last night - how I often realize this phenomenon immediately after it occurs, and feel helpless when I realize it. It's like two minds, one that is moving my hands to pile mangoes into my face, as the other is telling me to save some mangoes for later (they're very hard to stop eating). But on a more serious note, now that I realize I realize it, I realize it a lot.
adzm
I once got too enthusiastic about eating mangoes and my face learned that the skin contains urushiol like poison ivy.
EEBio
It’s intentional and requires quite a lot of focus.
The original paper [0] mentions electrodes are placed over Broca’s area (speech production, translates words to mouth movements) and motor area (adjusts the mouth movements). It’s attempted speech, not thoughts.
There is a lot of fear in mainstream media and populace of devices decoding thoughts, but that is a significantly harder problem, at this moment on the level of sci-fi of Civilisation Type II on Kardashev scale. There is a reason why the electrodes are not over Wernicke’s area instead (language comprehension and production).
Winsaucerer
Without having RTFA, I'd guess/predict that it will be possible to learn to only do this intentionally, much like we can think about raising our arm without actually raising it.
dylan604
I hope it's something better than "Hey Siri, say..."
Otherwise, yeah, that would be a new sort of hell where you had no private inner monologue
connicpu
The brain is incredibly adaptive, I guarantee eventually it would learn to avoid firing the neurons the device is probing when you don't want your inner monologue spoken aloud as long as there's a feedback loop where you experience negative emotions when something you didn't want spoken aloud was broadcast.
yaris
I often wonder how such teams build their devices - I assume it requires quite a few pieces of equipment that can't be bought at a nearby shop. Are such devices ordered from some manufacturer or are they built in-house somehow?
niemandhier
There are specialized companies selling components, what you cannot get you manufacture yourself. Assembling the device for prototypes like this is usually done in house.
Established labs often have a specialised section that cultivates all the little tricks how to do these things.
Knowledge is transferred by hiring postdocs that have the skills you need or by sending a phd student over to be trained.
As a scientist, if you do this for a while you end up with insane skills, but there is no place for them on the job market.
Everybody else is living 15 years in the past from your perspective.
numpad0
University researches in general? The boss always knows a small company that can make one, and staples a bidding notice to campus notice board for formality as the device is getting made and delivered. Isn't that how they do anywhere it might be?
N_Lens
The main challenge appears to be the neural-computer interface - the electrodes. As the article states, there are several startups in this space all bottlenecked by the same constraint, and accurately translating neural impulses into digital (Or even analog) signals is the key to unlocking a whole arena of transhuman development.
Most such startups are scaling up the number of electrodes interfacing with the neurons to overcome this bottleneck, but I wonder if an unconventional approach could overcome the limit more gracefully. I may be a dreamer, but a high fidelity synthetic neural fiber is the holy grail here. I do remember reading people partially healed of paralysis due to spinal injury, because of electrical conduits that bridged the injured neural gap.
andrybak
> In this second test, the word error rate was 43.75 percent, meaning participants identified a bit more than half of the recorded words correctly.
> [...]
> “We’re not at the point where it could be used in open-ended conversations. I think of this as a proof of concept,” [Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at UC Davis and a senior author of the study] says.
The ability to produce sound without a use of a dictionary sounds awesome. It is an interesting result, a proof of concept as the author of the study says, but the title is editorialized at best and effectively clickbait at worst, because most readers will assume that "near instantaneous speech" means "clear intelligible speech and ability to communicate".
dang
Ok, I've taken "near instantaneous" out of the title and put "proof of concept" in there, which is a phrase used by one of the researchers in the article.
pingou
Telepathy is on its way. Next step they just skip the conversion of brain signals to words and just directly send the signals to another brain. But I think some conversion/translation would still be necessary.
mettamage
The year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation. While humans have hard coded a moral code since birth, there are illegally born babies that do not undergo brain modification treatment. Moreover, the South Pacific Whale Society has no moral code. We should’ve never implanted this stuff into whales. The world will never be the same again.
serf
Ghost in the Shellfish.
I'll see myself out.
mettamage
Ooooh! You're on to something. They are part of the evil villain tag team group that's secretly behind all this! They call themselves Eel-on Mollusk.
briandw
Like in the book "Accelerando (Singularity)", the lobsters that get a protected sentience status
coldtea
>The year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation.
They'd stil have a president? They would probably already have a dictator that controls everybody through a mind-reading police state...
lambdaone
Or they are a hive mind, like Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiners.
gpm
Lots of dictatorships use democratic language. See Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. Or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
alluro2
No, that's the Republic of Murica, where Trump The Third is a BDFL.
icoder
So Long, and Thanks for All the Krill
thrance
I think it would be deserved if whales started bombing our streets.
Cthulhu_
I think (futurology / science fiction) that they will make some kind of brain link, but there won't be any translations happening in between, just raw brain signals from one to the other, like an extra sensory input; there won't be any encoding or data that can be translated to speech or images, but the connected brains will be able to learn to comprehend and send the signals to / from each other and learn to communicate that way.
hearsathought
I still fail to see how that's possible since it is assumed every brain "encodes" data uniquely. Communication between computers is possible because we have agreed upon standards. If every computer encoded characters differently, no communication would be possible. Without agreed upon ports or agreed upon mechanism to agree upon ports one computer could not communicate with another. So how can brain-to-brain communication work given that encoding/communication "standards" are impossible since each brain is different?
For example, I see a tree and my brain generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. Another person sees the tree and generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. How would my brain communicate "tree" to his brain since both our "trees" are unique to our brains?
My brain device reads my brain signal "1010101" for tree. My friend's device reads brain signal "1011101" for tree. How could we possibly map 1010101 to 1011101. Or is the assumption that human brains have identical signals/encoding for each thought.
goopypoop
I already learned to interpret touch, taste, smision etc. when I was just a baby. How hard can a new one be?
falcor84
That sort of connection would be very susceptible to psychic attacks - I'm thinking of the telepaths in Babylon 5, being trained for offensive capabilities, as well as just plain old spam advertising. So while "defaulting to trust" is often considered societally useful, I believe that it would be better for everyone if cross-brain messages are sent in a format that can be analyzed (and entirely blocked) by a filter on the receiving side.
lambdaone
There would probably be a Universal Common Embedding used as an intermediate representation between people's individual private neural representations. Likely the distant descendant of our open-source neural models.
And machines would of course also use the Universal Common Embedding to communicate, as man and machine meld into a seamless distributed whole.
It all seems a little bit too inevitable for my liking at this point.
z3t4
We are so different, but I guess with a lot of training we could interpret each others thoughts. A first step would be to record your own thoughts and then replay them in order to see if you experience the same thing you did when the thoughts where recorded. It's possible that our brain is constantly re-configuring so that even your own recorded thoughts would make no sense.
aspenmayer
This is sort of explored in the film Strange Days, which is probably not very well known generally but perhaps would have a large fan base on HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Had no idea til I looked it up just now that James Cameron did the story, of Avatar, which shares a lot of tech influences with Strange Days. They could even be in the same cinematic universe, though many years apart.
voidUpdate
I think the main problem with that is that different people thing in different ways. I think in full sentences and 3D images, whereas other people might think without images at all. How do you translate that?
suspended_state
It is very likely that this device works by perceiving and interpreting brain waves. Actually, from the article:
> “We recorded neural activities from single neurons, which is the highest resolution of information we can get from our brain,” Wairagkar says. The signal registered by the electrodes was then sent to an AI algorithm called a neural decoder that deciphered those signals and extracted speech features such as pitch or voicing.
yieldcrv
If statements
for how the brain chip chooses to function
coldtea
Next step: techno-slavery
aspenmayer
We’ll probably call it something less on the nose, more euphemistic, almost clinical, medical even.
Nerve stapling, perhaps?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/SidMeiersAlpha...
George Carlin - Euphemisms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
spinlock_
Don't forget the injection of ads for the basic subscription plan, Black Mirror S7/E1 vibes.
germinalphrase
Telepathy, or maybe memory and experience sharing media machine, or maybe humanity id unification device, or maybe flesh robot actualizer, or maybe a looping torture horror show mask. The possibilities are endless!
goopypoop
I look forward to learning that your favourite fruit is AAAARRGGHHHH
dotancohen
Maybe he was dictating?
seydor
Not without ads being injected. But it's a small price to pay for such amazing capabilities
midtake
Like the trisolarans
newcommiedeal
[flagged]
aitchnyu
Cant wait for a man-choker that executes "I'm having costlier rice, check if glucose spike is lower than usual rice". Yes, both devices are outside my body.
stephenlf
I don’t understand what this means. Did you use a translate app?
TheCapeGreek
I think it's perfectly legible?
man-choker would just be a choker (you know, the accessory usually for women) with some tech on it, in this case to accept a command to check with another bio-device if the glucose spike of more expensive rice is better or worse than cheap rice.
shawabawa3
it's legible but a very confusing sentence
man-choker is not a word, and choker is a niche garment, why not "necklace" or just "wearable"?
Then it "executes" a question?
and then there's a reference to "both devices" - what devices?
You need to put together a lot of context clues and assumptions to get to: They are probably a diabetic with a glucose monitor and pump, and they want a smart device to analyse the data with natural language (but again, why a choker specifically? Wouldn't a smart watch or something make more sense?)
patmorgan23
Massachusetts' New England merch only names Irish citites. Is also legible but equally incoherent.
Curious how much intentionality is required from the user to produce sounds. It would be unfortunate if this device just started firing off speech for what would otherwise be thoughts one would not say out loud. I suppose that depends on the mechanism required to activate the neurons to which the device is connected.