Elon Musk's neuroscience startup Neuralink Corp. is expected to give a progress report on its brain-implant technology in a highly anticipated streamed event Wednesday night. In a tweet last week, the company teased a demo for the event, which begins at 9 p.m. New York time, with a short video that slowly spelled out the message "please join us for a show and tell." Some outside researchers said the video may indicate that a Neuralink device has been used to decode brain signals to type words on a screen, although they speculated that it would most likely be through a monkey or a wearable device. Neuralink has been testing its implant technology on nonhuman primates for several years, including in April 2021, when the company released a video showing that a monkey implanted with two Neuralink devices could play a videogame called Pong as the device translated its brain activity into commands with the help of machine-learning software. Other researchers have managed to use a brain-computer interface to enable monkeys to produce words on a computer screen.

An artificial neural network (AI) designed by an international team involving UCL can translate raw data from brain activity, paving the way for new discoveries and a closer integration between technology and the brain. The new method could accelerate discoveries of how brain activities relate to behaviors. The study published today in eLife, co-led by the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig and funded by Wellcome and the European Research Council, shows that a convolutional neural network, a specific type of deep learning algorithm, is able to decode many different behaviors and stimuli from a wide variety of brain regions in different species, including humans. Lead researcher Markus Frey (Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience), said, "Neuroscientists have been able to record larger and larger datasets from the brain but understanding the information contained in that data--reading the neural code--is still a hard problem. In most cases we don't know what messages are being transmitted. "We wanted to develop an automatic method to analyze raw neural data of many different types, circumventing the need to manually decipher them." They tested the network, called DeepInsight, on neural signals from rats exploring an open arena and found it was able to precisely predict the position, head direction, and running speed of the animals. Even without manual processing, the results were more accurate than those obtained with conventional analyses. Senior author Professor Caswell Barry (UCL Cell & Developmental Biology), said, "Existing methods miss a lot of potential information in neural recordings because we can only decode the elements that we already understand.

AI algorithms can help scientists process brain waves and convert them directly into speech, according to new research. "Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said Nima Mesgarani, senior author of the paper published in Scientific Reports and a researcher at Columbia University. "With today's study, we have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener." Neurons in our brain's auditory cortex are excited whenever we listen to people speak – or even imagine people speaking.