Neural Interfaces

[happyrat1]

Hi folks, I'm new to the forums but I thought this is the right sort of crowd to share this with.

A few months back I was doing some youtube searches and came up with this little gem.



Here's a link to the accompanying article.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13449-nervetapping-neckband-used-in-telepathic-chat.html

And here's a link to the company who actually made this breaktrhu and to their development kit.

http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=technology

http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=buy

While I'd dearly love to lay my hands on one of their development kits, the $2K price tag is a little steep for my budget.

Anyway, what I'm wondering about is that since this video and article are from 6 years ago, why haven't we all heard more stuff about this?

From what I can gather, it works based on laryngeal myography using only external sensors.

Brave New World folks?  Or 1984?

How difficult would it be to design a custom chip, with an onboard thermocouple power source and microtransmitter and inject it directly into the larynx?

In the meantime though, I wouldn't mind trying my hand at making this work with external sensors and their developer's kit software.  Maybe if I cut down on the lobster lunches I could squeeze one out of my budget

Anyway, if this was released 6 years ago, I have to ask myself what's the current state of the art with this technology.

Between speech recognition software and this primitive thought recognition technology are we really getting closer to a practical neural interface?

Google glass seems to have the visual output pretty well covered these days. What's next?  Corneal implants scanning our retinas?

Is this the future of our evolution as a species?  Or a new tool of opression for our "beloved" overlords?

Enquiring minds wanna know...

Gary

[G7PSK]

I can't see how that would work, the nerve signals to the vocal cords only tell the muscles to tighten or relax it is the amount of air then passed through them and how that is then manipulated by the mouth and tongue and lips that form the sounds. So if the person only thinks about the words and dose not actually produce them there is no speech just possibly nerve signals to the larynx, on the other hand if just thinking speech produces speech but very quietly a good throat mike may be all that is required. 

[happyrat1]

Well personally I have a pet theory about how it works.  Using external sensors they are monitoring the myograms of the entire throat structure, and the passage of air is incidental to the act of imparting intelligence to verbal speech.  In essence, the airflow is the carrier wave and the throat mechanics, specifically the larynx, is the modulator,

Let's take this a step further then.

What if the larynx acts like a speaker diaphragm and unless consciously willed to activate, idles with a sort of continuous flow of verbal information which does not actually vocalize unless the person wills it?

If so, then they can tap into that laryngeal nerve and decode whatever form of neural pulse code modulation it is using to reconstruct a verbal thought?

Who knows?  Perhaps the larynx is constantly "idling" to the tune of verbal thought and merely awaiting the trigger signal to set it into actual motion?

Like I said, I'd really like to lay my hands on one of those developers' kits.

Gary

[G7PSK]

People who loose their tongue for whatever reason are unable to talk as is also the case with the loss of function of other facial muscles.
Even loosing a few teeth can require the person to learn to speak again and people who loose the larynx can talk if a single frequency vibration is introduced by mechanical means.

[happyrat1]

While I don't doubt this technology was originally developed to aid the speech impaired my point is however that the proof of concept in the video was demonstrated on a person with a normally operating speech pattern.

This opens the door to a host of other potential applications above and beyond the therapeutic.

Coupled with voice recognition systems it could conceivably allow computer control of any piece of hardware that can function within a given set of limited voice commands, both silently and with almost telepathic ease.

Aside from the mundane demonstration of a voiceless phone call, I'm curious as to exactly HOW vocal we would become with such a device, a chip no larger than a grain of sand, injected directly into the larynx itself?

I could see the spooks and creeps of the intelligence community jumping all over this thing as a silent, encrypted, and effortless means of communication just for openers.

For that matter, I'd be curious to see how an interrogation would go using this technology as well.  This could become a better tool for law enforcement than any simple lie detector.

Part of the problem is that the theaudeo website is remarkably sparse on the details of the mechanisms involved.  But it wouldn't surprise me if they were developing applications for law enforcement and the military as we speak

Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is to invest in a tinfoil scarf to go along with your tinfoil hat if you want to keep the CIA from reading your mind

Gary...