Breakthrough in Locked In Syndrome

[Quartz]

BBC article here.

Patients with absolutely no control over their body have finally been able to communicate, say scientists.
A brain-computer interface was used to read the thoughts of patients to answer basic yes-or-no questions.

This is real progress.

[Lasciel]

“Can I get married?”

No
No
No
No
Yes (maybe)
NO
No
Yes (maybe)
No
NO

“He said Yes! I’m getting married!”

What a funny story to use for the article. Why ask if you weren’t interested in getting a real answer?

[coffeecat]

If you can say “yes” and “no,” you can say anything. Teach these poor people Morse code, or POW tap code.

[Dendarii_Dame]

@coffeecat

If you can say “yes” and “no,” you can say anything. Teach these poor people Morse code, or POW tap code.

How difficult/easy is it for them to say “yes” or “no”? If it’s possible, though, I agree about Morse code.

[aceplace57]

A poster here has locked in syndrome. It’s been awhile since he posted.

He had some way to communicate. I think it was eye blinks?

[hajario]

@aceplace57

A poster here has locked in syndrome. It’s been awhile since he posted.

He had some way to communicate. I think it was eye blinks?

Sadly he passed away some time back. He was able to blink.

[Procrustus]

@hajario

Sadly he passed away some time back. He was able to blink.

That’s what I recall. Fascinating person. I think he went by blinky even.

[ratatoskK]

This is blinkie’s thread (“Ask the guy with locked in syndrome.”) He truly was an interesting person.

[aceplace57]

I didn’t realize he’d died.

I found his thread very interesting.

[Vicsage]

Hook it up to a flashing red light and we’ll be ready for Capt. Pike.

[Spoons]

@Procrustus

That’s what I recall. Fascinating person. I think he went by blinky even.

Yes, blinkie. Nice guy. We PM’d a few times, mostly stuff like Christmas greetings. He told his story–well, most of it–in Teemings, the online magazine that existed for a while.

[Quartz]

@hajario

Sadly he passed away some time back.

Blast!

I’d remembered there was a member here with LIS but couldn’t remember his name.

[Oukile]

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for two decades. The originality here is the way they calibrated it.

The classical method is to instruct the patient to perform actions such as “think about moving your left arm to say ‘yes’”; record brain signals for some test questions and calibrate the system based on this (as well as train patients to “think” the right way to make the process work well).

They found that this method was inefficient for completely paralyzed patients so they opted for an approach where the system is based on test questions such as “is Berlin the capital of France” where the brain will answer automatically.

From the paper:

All [previous] BCI procedures mentioned above were based on effortful and explicit (conscious) voluntary control of a neuroelectric brain response such as learning with feedback and reward, […] to focus attention on a visually or auditorily presented sequence of letters in order to select a desired letter with the brain response. […] The required activation of explicit-voluntary (controlled) attention in these BCI tasks, none of them resulting in stable learning of brain-based communication, prompted us to propose the theoretical psychophysiological notion of “extinction of goal directed cognition and thought” in complete paralysis with otherwise intact cognitive processing.
we argue that classical reflexive conditioning and learning might circumvent volitional effort in instrumental control. Thus, an experimental procedure involving processing of overlearned (“automatic”) questions (i.e., “Berlin is the capital of France,” “You are in pain”) asking for automatic cognitive processing only may fulfill this criterion.