Time To Kill Keyboards – Brain Reading Devices Are On Their Way

The QWERTY keyboard is one of the best electronic devices that translate human thoughts into digital text which is then made available for humans to read or computers for processing. This QWERTY keyboard is indulged in this translating process for more than 40 years and now became part of human life. But, the recent researches in the mind reading using brain scans to identify certain thoughts with certain words made us to visualise a keyboard less future in the coming decades.



Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a neuroimaging brain scan showed some definite patterns of human brain activity sparked by thinking about certain physical objects. "The basic idea is that whatever subject is on someone's mind — not just topics or concepts, but also emotions, plans or socially oriented thoughts — is ultimately reflected in the pattern of activity across all areas of his or her brain," said Matthew Botvinick, a psychologist at Princeton University's Neuroscience Institute.

Their research also showed up that the pattern of brain activity formed by some logically related words were looking similar. That is the fMRI pattern of human brain activity while thinking about the body parts like nose, hand looks similar no matter what the body part he is thinking.

Although, there is an existing technology currently used by people who were affected with complete paralysis. Yet they need an eye movement to select a letter at a time to form words.  There is also another technology to translate peoples thought to create certain synthesized vowel sounds. But the direct thought to word translation is never achieved by anyone until Botvinik started working on it.

Also in the coming years it is possible to translate peoples, actions, abstract concepts and relationships that we think in our mind along with the objects. Though Botvinik cautioned about the time this new technology needed to kill the keyboards, this will be of greater help to peoples like Stephen Hawking, a great physicist sooner.

Source: Brain-Reading Devices Could Kill the Keyboard | Live Science