San Francisco (CNN Business)Elon Musk's Neuralink isn't the only company that wants to send your thoughts straight from your brain to a computer.
More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work.
The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to "decode" speech from brainwaves in real time.
As it turns out, this is possible: A study published Tuesday showed that researchers could instantly see — as text on a computer screen — a word or phrase that a participant was saying by looking at brain activity, as long as it was among a limited set of answers in response to predetermined questions. The study includes three epilepsy patients voluntarily implanted with electrodes.
Facebook is also footing the bill for a new, year-long study that UCSF is currently conducting where it will try to use brain activity to help a person who can't speak communicate. The social network hopes the efforts could help reveal which brain signals are key for that non-invasive wearable that it's planning for in the years ahead.
"We expect that to take upwards of 10 years," Mark Chevillet, a research director at Facebook Reality Labs who runs its brain-computer interface group, told CNN Business of the overall project. "This is a long-term research program."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/30/tech/facebook-mind-reading-research/index.html