Imagine this! A way to let paralyzed people communicate using only the power of thought. Researchers from Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital) have demonstrated the potential for speech by a silent person using the power of thought only.
The scientists implanted depth electrodes in a subject’s brain that transmitted the electrical signals to a computer and asked him to imagine saying one of two syllables. The device then vocalized the syllables.
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The study was led by Dr. Ariel Tankus of Tel Aviv University’s School of Medical and Health Sciences and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital), along with Dr. Ido Strauss of Tel Aviv University’s School of Medical and Health Sciences and director of the Functional Neurosurgery Unit at Ichilov Hospital.
“The patient in the study is an epilepsy patient who was hospitalized in order to undergo resection of the epileptic focus in his brain,” explains Dr. Tankus. “In order to do this, of course, you need to locate the focal point, which is the source of the ‘short’ that sends powerful electrical waves through the brain. This situation pertains to a smaller subset of epilepsy patients who do not respond well to medication and require neurosurgical intervention, and an even smaller subset of epilepsy patients whose suspected focus is located deep within the brain, rather than on the surface of the cortex.”
Pinpointing the exact origin of seizures often requires implanting electrodes deep within the brain. Patients then undergo hospitalization while awaiting a seizure. When one occurs, the electrodes act as a live feed, revealing the seizure’s starting point to neurologists and neurosurgeons, enabling a precise surgical approach. From a scientific standpoint, this offers a unique window into the inner workings of a living human brain. Thankfully, a patient with epilepsy at Ichilov Hospital volunteered for this procedure, which holds promise for helping completely paralyzed individuals regain their voice through artificial speech technology.
In the first stage of the experiment, with the depth electrodes already implanted in the patient’s
brain, the Tel Aviv University researchers asked him to say two syllables out loud: /a/ and /e/. They recorded the brain activity as he articulated these sounds. Using deep learning and machine learning, the researchers trained artificial intelligence models to identify the specific brain cells whose electrical activity indicated the desire to say /a/ or /e/. Once the computer learned to recognize the pattern of electrical activity associated with these two syllables in the patient’s brain, he was asked to only imagine that he was saying /a/ and /e/. The computer then translated the electrical signals and played the pre-recorded sounds of /a/ or /e/ accordingly.
“My field of research deals with the encoding and decoding of speech, that is, how individual brain cells participate in the speech process — the production of speech, the hearing of speech, and the imagination of speech, or ‘speaking silently,’” says Dr. Tankus. “In this experiment, for the first time in history, we were able to connect the parts of speech to the activity of individual cells from the regions of the brain from which we recorded. This allowed us to distinguish between the electrical signals that represent the sounds /a/ and /e/. At the moment, our research involves two building blocks of speech, two syllables.”
