“I sometimes can’t control my emotions and laugh a lot and don’t do too good with the experiment,” he emailed.ĭr. Pancho’s buoyant personality has helped the researchers navigate challenges, but also occasionally makes speech recognition uneven. “It’s the most natural way for people to communicate,” he said. Speed is a key reason the project focuses on speaking, tapping directly into the brain’s word production system rather than hand movements involved in typing or writing. Chang says faster decoding is possible, although it’s unclear if it will approach the pace of typical conversational speech: about 150 words per minute. That was the maximum rate the study allowed because the computer waited between prompts. Through the electrodes, Pancho communicated 15 to 18 words per minute. Last year, the researchers gave him another device involving a head-controlled mouse, but it is still not nearly as fast as the brain electrodes in the research sessions. “I had to bend/lean my head forward, down, and poke a key letter one-by-one to write,” he emailed. After surgery for serious damage to his stomach, he was discharged from the hospital, walking, talking and thinking he was on the road to recovery.įor years, Pancho communicated by spelling out words on a computer using a pointer attached to a baseball cap, an arduous method that allowed him to type about five correct words per minute. Pancho was a healthy field worker in California’s vineyards until a car crash after a soccer game one summer Sunday, he said. Later, he emailed: “Not to be able to communicate with anyone, to have a normal conversation and express yourself in any way, it’s devastating, very hard to live with.”ĭuring research sessions with the electrodes, he wrote, “It’s very much like getting a second chance to talk again.” “I just want to, I don’t know, get something good, because I always was told by doctors that I had 0 chance to get better,” Pancho typed during a video chat from the Northern California nursing home where he lives. ![]() ![]() The brain implant’s recognition of his spoken words is “a life-changing experience,” he said. In interviews over several weeks for this article, he communicated through email exchanges using a head-controlled mouse to painstakingly type key-by-key, the method he usually relies on.
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