Scientists and engineers can help people who have had traumatic brain injuries. Our son worked for awhile with a company developing implants that sit on the surface of the brain. The electrical signals that reach the surface are a tangled and partial image of what’s going on down deep.
Ingenious processing of the voltages at thousands of points can reveal, say, that the person wants to say “Please take me to the sun room” or “I just figured out a geometry problem.” After the great effort of creating the program to interpret signals there is the problem of brain “chatter.”
Our lofty thoughts are joined by the trivial or the embarrassing. I was told of a movie in which Soviet (?) military pilots fly by thought control but make disastrous mistakes by having thoughts of sex flit in. How can brain implants be engineered to avert that?
Erin Kuntz and colleagues in 17 academic departments at 6 universities and hospitals tested a solution: The patient has to think of the password he or she had set, before the system tries to decode a string of thoughts and then say them out loud. Kinda slow, likely safe. We’re still a long way from really good systems. May we progress fast!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Cell, doi.org/10/g9xm7:2025, reported in Nature, 28 Aug. 2025, 852-3
Image: My own composition on image from biology site
