If you've never heard colours, you can now do so. Researchers planted tiny electrodes on the surface of the brain of a man paralysed from the neck down. As he imagined writing letters with his hand, the researchers analysed the neural patterns for each letter. They created an algorithm that transformed these neural patterns into words on a screen [Anushree Dave, ScienceNews]. From his brain activity alone, the participant produced 90 characters, or 15 words, per minute, Krishna Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University, and colleagues report May 12 in Nature.

A machine learning algorithm has shown the ability to link specific behaviors, such as walking and breathing, to their related brain signals – a first step to developing brain-machine interfaces. The algorithm, funded by the US Army, was tested on two monkeys that made various arm and eye movements. The technology successfully isolated the neural patterns in each of the animal's brain signals and determined which control these specific movements. The brain decoding algorithm could be designed to restore lost functions in those suffering with neurological and mental disorders. Although the algorithm is still in the development phase, the team sees it being used in brain-machine interfaces.

At any given moment in time, our brain is involved in various activities. For example, when typing on a keyboard, our brain not only dictates our finger movements but also how thirsty we feel at that time. As a result, brain signals contain dynamic neural patterns that reflect a combination of these activities simultaneously. A standing challenge has been isolating those patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior, such as finger movements. Further, developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that help people with neurological and mental disorders requires the translation of brain signals into a specific behavior, a problem called decoding.

You're sitting in a meeting and start to feel your stomach rumble. You reach for a muffin but stop when you realise that there's only one left and your manager is watching. In that moment, you make the decision to go hungry. But what happened in your brain in the split second where you changed your mind? A new study from the University of Melbourne and the University College London (UCL) has investigated how our brains integrate new information to allow us to change our final decisions.

We all remember Maxim Gorky, Rabindranath Tagore, Ernest Hemingway, James Watt, Thomas Alva Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Wright Brothers as some of the few people who left their mark in the world but do you also know that all of them were partially or wholly self-taught. They did not rely completely on the education that school had to offer. These kinds of people are called autodidacts. Here is a list of such people, try and see how many you already know. It was very beautifully penned down by the American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, Mark Twain as "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

A few weeks ago, I was in the process of transitioning out from one project to another at work. This provided an awesome time window to read up on some of the long pending topics of interest. Machine learning topped that list. It is a field that has already permeated the technology world deeply but I had no understanding of what it is all about. Just a few weeks of surface level reading since then (and playing around with some of the tools) has left me pretty convinced that we are fast accelerating towards a general artificial intelligence.