Mind control technology breakthrough lets paralysed man write on screen

Mind control technology has been developing quickly in recent years thanks to research projects by companies including Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Prototype technology that has seen pigs learn to control simple computer games via sensors picking up electrical activity in their brains is fascinating. But useful real-life applications of mind control technology are also edging closer as a result.

The most recent example of that is a research project whose details were recently published in the journal Nature. The research led to a 65-year-old American man paralysed from the neck down as a result of a spinal cord injury writing sentences on a screen. He was able to do so only by imagining he was writing the letters and words with a pen.

That was achieved thanks to a brain-computer interface (BCI) consisting of two implants able to pick up electrical brain activity. When we think about writing a particular letter of the alphabet our brain emits a faint flicker of electrical impulses.

Scientists have now connected particular patterns of electrical brain activity with individual letters of the alphabet. So when someone wearing implants able to pick up the electrical signals imagines writing a letter a computer algorithm can understand which letter and type it on the screen.

The research was led by Stanford University’s Dr Frank Willett, who commented on the results and their implications:

“In the near term, people who have ‘locked-in’ syndrome, or paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles, stand to benefit most from this. Imagine if you could only move your eyes up and down but couldn’t move anything else. A device like this could enable you to type your thoughts at speeds that are comparable to that of normal handwriting or typing on a smartphone.”

The first person to use the technology smashed the previous record for a BCI interpreting brain signals to write 90 characters a minute – more than double the previous best and only about 25% slower than the typical handwriting speed of 120 characters a minute.

The difference is that previous attempts at the mind-controlled technology involved the user using their thoughts to move a cursor on a screen to click the letters they wanted to type. In the new approach, the algorithm can directly interpret the imagining of handwriting.

The team involved in the research also has ambitions to similarly recreate speech and has been working on decoding the neural activity associated with how we form the sounds that our words and sentences consist of.