Researchers imitate Pink Floyd’s song by reading people’s “minds”. Sciences

The brain activity of 29 people was analyzed for the study. For three minutes they listened to the song “Another Brick in the Wall” by the English band Pink Floyd. Their brain activity was detected by placing electrodes on the surface of their brains when they underwent epilepsy surgery.

Brain wave recordings can be detected via artificial intelligence (AI) and converted into sounds and words. Surprising result: sentenceAll in all, it’s just another brick in the wall“It’s clearly recognizable, even though it sounds muffled. Even the rhythm and melody can be picked up—something that’s never been done before. Now you can actually listen to the brain and mimic the music a person has heard,” says Gerwen Schalke, a scientist. The neuroscientist who collected the data for the study, told The New York Times.

Robert Knight, the neurologist who conducted the study, told The Guardian that the short video clip sounds muffled and “a bit like talking underwater”. He suspects that the quality would be improved if the electrodes were placed closer together. “The average distance between the electrodes was about 5mm, but we’ve had a few patients with a distance of 3mm. They did better on reconstruction. Now that we know how to do it, I think the sound quality would be much better if it was We have electrodes that are a millimeter and a half apart.”

In the future, it may be possible to make such recordings without the need for surgery, for example using electrodes attached to the scalp.

With this knowledge of how our brains process music, scientists can develop new “speech prostheses” for people who have trouble speaking due to a neurological disorder. Elements like pitch, rhythm, and intonation are “things that make us a spirited talker, not a robot,” Schalke says. The researchers hope to be able to develop devices capable of maintaining this.