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[David]

On Sunday, 4 August 2019 11:40:47 AEST Karl Auer wrote:
>> I can't imagine thought commands being better fidelity.
> 
> You know better than to use the argument from personal incredulity :-)

I think Jan's right!

Recently The Guardian ran a piece "Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text" - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/30/neuroscientists-decode-brain-speech-signals-into-actual-sentences   It's valuable research intended to make life easier for people with impaired motor function.

The subject was required to "speak" commands without actually verbalising them, and the device picked up nerve signals from speech muscules (rather than from a microphone) which were then converted to text.  Presumably it wouldn't work well, or at all, for people who are born profoundly deaf and haven't fully developed their speech reflexes.

This is a vastly different proposition to decoding thoughts.  It's long been assumed that brain activity for particular tasks occurs in specific areas of the brain, but recent work suggests it's much more distributed.  Even without that complication, I think that identifying a concept from brain activity before it's been verbalised is science-fiction stuff.

David L