Thursday, March 8, 2012

Voicegrams transform brain activity into words Computational models decode and reconstruct neural responses to speech.


Nature | News

Voicegrams transform brain activity into words

Computational models decode and reconstruct neural responses to speech.
Spoken words can be reconstructed from the way neurons react in the brain.
OSCAR BURRIEL/SPL
The brain’s electrical activity can be decoded to reconstruct which words a person is hearing, researchers report today in PLoS Biology1.
Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues recorded the brain activity of 15 people who were undergoing evaluation before unrelated neurosurgical procedures. The researchers placed electrodes on the surface of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), part of the brain's auditory system, to record the subjects’ neuronal activity in response to pre-recorded words and sentences.
The STG is thought to participate in the intermediate stages of speech processing, such as the transformation of sounds into phonemes, or speech sounds, yet little is known about which specific features, such as syllable rate or volume fluctuations, it represents.......
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