Researchers believe that their new technique for monitoring brain waves may be able to help with disabilities such as locked-in syndrome in the future.
This new technique can monitoring brain waves can identify the music someone is listening to.
The researchers at the University of Essex hope that this project could lead to helping individuals with severe communication disabilities such as locked-in syndrome or stroke patients, by decoding language signals within their brains through non-invasive techniques.
Dr Ian daly, who led this research, says: “This method has many potential applications. We have shown we can decode music, which suggests that we may, one day, be able to decode language from the brain.”
Scientists at the university wanted to discover a less invasive way of decoding acoustic information from signals in the brain to identify and reconstruct a piece of music someone was listening to.
There have previously been successful studies which have monitored and reconstructed acoustic information from brain waves, however they have used more invasive methods such as electrocortiography (ECoG), which involves placing electrodes inside the skull to monitor the actual surface of the brain.
This research, used a combination of two non-invasive methods – fMRI, which measures blood flow through the entire brain, and electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures what is happening in the brain in real time, which monitors an individual’s brain activity whilst listening to a piece of music.
Music is a complex acoustic signal, meaning it shares many similarities with natural language, so this model could potentially be adapted to translate speech.
The eventual goal of this strand of research would be to translate thought, which could offer an important aid in the future for people who struggle to communicate, such as those with locked-in syndrome.
Dr Daly says: “One application is brain-computer interfacing (BCI), which provides a communication channel directly between the brain and a computer. Obviously, this is a long way off but eventually we hope that if we can successfully decode language, we can use this to build communication aids, which is another important step towards the ultimate aim of BCI research and could, one day, provide a lifeline for people with severe communication disabilities.”
