In addition, Chang, who is also co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at UC Berkeley and UCSF, said that we may someday be able to use this technology for neuroprosthetic devices for decoding the intentions and thoughts from paralyzed patients that cannot communicate. They represent a major advance in understanding how the human brain processes language, with immediate implications for the study of impairment during aging, attention deficit disorder, autism and language learning disorders. The new findings show that the representation of speech in the cortex does not just reflect the entire external acoustic environment but instead just what we really want or need to hear. Speech Recognition by the Human Brain and Machines “The algorithm worked so well that we could predict not only the correct responses, but also even when they paid attention to the wrong word,” Chang said. In other words, they could tell when the listener’s attention strayed to another speaker. They found that their decoding algorithm could predict which speaker and even what specific words the subject was listening to based on those neural patterns. Strikingly, the authors found that neural responses in the auditory cortex only reflected those of the targeted speaker. The authors then applied new decoding methods to “reconstruct” what the subjects heard from analyzing their brain activity patterns. They were asked to identify the words they heard spoken by one of the two speakers. In the experiments, patients listened to two speech samples played to them simultaneously in which different phrases were spoken by different speakers. “The combination of high-resolution brain recordings and powerful decoding algorithms opens a window into the subjective experience of the mind that we’ve never seen before,” Chang said. UCSF is one of few leading academic epilepsy centers where these advanced intracranial recordings are done, and, Chang said, the ability to safely record from the brain itself provides unique opportunities to advance our fundamental knowledge of how the brain works. These electrodes record activity in the temporal lobe - home to the auditory cortex. The UCSF epilepsy team finds those locales by mapping the brain’s activity over a week, with a thin sheet of up to 256 electrodes placed under the skull on the brain’s outer surface or cortex. Part of this surgery involves pinpointing the parts of the brain responsible for disabling seizures.
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