Free Will: predicting words with EEG patterns (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 09, 2016, 00:39 (3028 days ago) @ David Turell

Japanese researchers are able to do this about 25% of the time:-http://techxplore.com/news/2016-01-decipher-words-mind-spoken.html-" The team in Japan enlisted the assistance of 12 volunteers of various ages, asking each to undergo EEG scans while they thought about words and then spoke them out loud. The initial stages resulted in the buildup of brain patterns in a database—later, as each person recited words, the researchers read their brain waves to see if they could identify the words they were about to speak by comparing current brain wave patterns with those in the database. Similar research has been done before, but this time, the researchers looked specifically at brain waves emanating from the Broca area—which is a part of the brain where formation of words occurs before they are sent to other parts of the brain that are used to actually speak them. By limiting the vocabulary, the researchers found they could correctly interpret the words a person was about to speak (up to 2 seconds beforehand), approximately 25 percent of the time. They also found they could up that percentage to near 90 percent if they focused instead on just (Japanese) characters, or syllables.-***-"The paper noted that the research benefited by using Japanese speaking volunteers, because every character in that language has a vowel in it—the lack of them in many western language, it has been noted, has been making it more difficult for researchers in the field working with volunteers who speak in English, for example."-Comment: The two-second gap involves thinking of the word and then speaking it.