A Brain Implant That Turns Your Thoughts Into Text | Tom Oxley | TED 

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There will always be someone who’s going to use technology carelessly and for unwise reasons, but tbh this is so inspiring and I believe the benefit will surpass the potential downside… I’m tearing up with the statement “even when my body is failing, I can still say I love you to the loved ones” this is true humanity

I'm tearing up watching this, from imagining how precious this technology would've been for my grandfather. He spent his life in the pulpit as a preacher and community leader. Known for using his oratory gift to help guide others through difficult times. After a nasty stroke, he lost all control and sensation of the entire right side of his body and brain. His frustration with his inability to communicate was the only thing our family never had to decipher.

This could be used as a form of digital therapy where repressed thoughts are not just revealed as text but visualized into metaphorical simulations helping the person deal with their repressed trauma.

Incredible. I hope it will never be used for bad reasons but if course it will...

Cool to think we're going to be able to see someone with these conditions be able to write a book, create a podcast, or maybe even run for office with these new technologies. The potential is endless!

It is crazy to me how there is technology that can follow out thoughts and even observe how we think. In the wrong hands this can be dangerous.

I've another lecture where the eye direction worked like a mouse and the left and/or closing of the eyes worked like left/right mouse click. That sounds easier and cheaper to implement than surgery imo.

This is absolutely incredible

Wow. What a life changing use case scenario for this technology. These people will get a second chance to connect.

I remember hearing about Stentrode years ago and thinking it sounded like perhaps the best balance currently in development between fidelity and convenience. Glad to see them making so much progress. Looking forward to more.

This talk was absolutely amazing

impressed with the amount of ppl who seem to believe the thingy reads your thoghts.... watch 1:29 and 9:12, the device captures when the brain tells a body part to move (9:12), and that is understood by the device as a command to click, so the person has to "spell" everything they wanna say on a virtual keyboard like the one at 1:29 and 1:54

The growth and development of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) has been incredible over the years. It’s so reliving to know that health conditions that shut people off from the world of fun and social media have become less debilitating all thanks to BCI. Keep working effortlessly to make the world a better place through BCI. Great presentation 👏

Amazing and blessed to be able to find this video !!!

I love this technology, it could also improve our future as humans. We should make reacheble for most of people who have disabilities.

“I don’t think this would be a good idea” - My thoughts

There is a dark side to that technology that cannot be ignored. What triggered me was the part near the end where Tom is talking about sharing feelings. That means not only are you sensing - reading the emotions, the plan is to induce them too. THAT is the game changer that takes this device from medical aid to terrifying mind / behavior control. This device is implanted and wireless.... Considering just how bad the state of computer security is, and how things are getting worse not better, the risk is way WAY too great. What could possibly go wrong with a device like that? Imagine going to the voting booth and as you are about to check that box, a wave of fear grabs you and you change your vote. Or worse, used by nefarious groups to enslave people by inducing fear, pain, love for certain behaviors. History teaches us that people will misuse technology like this for the absolute worst possible reasons. This technology is in its infancy. We went from the Wright brothers first flight with fabric and sticks to a moon landing in less than 70 years. I give this technology less than 10 to be horribly abused.

Amazing. I'm down for this.

Amazing to see how they try to implement a BCI This might as well have been a TED talk about nuralink though. I wonder how they'll compete 😲

Amazing work tom!!! :)

Really amazing idea, hope it will become available for everyone that is so unfortunate to need this to communicate and feel human again. I can fortunately use my eyes still which is a little faster.

Thank you, I really appreciate your achievement. I trust you but hardly trust what my eyes see in your presentation. congratulation.

Incredible progress

idk why this makes me want to cry.. in a good way

So wonderful.

This man is going to get a Nobel Prize for medicine, and Graham is a bonafide astronaut of science. Astonishing.

i honestly was thinking this last night.talking is exhasting, my mouth cannot keep up.

This technology is wonderful and how thankful disabled people must be. But the sound bodied are able to learn and cultivate this internal use of language as a natural progression - from speech , through writing, to imaging or visualising words in the brain. The energy resource: the dynamic in the meaning of words: (expressed in speech and writing ) is retained internally, augmenting intention.

Great work.

Beautiful TED

Brilliant presentation, Tom, thank you for this incredible work 😃 I believe Docs that work on NeuroScience are doing some of the most profoundly important work imaginable & this technique of going through the blood veins is awe-inspiring 🙏🏽

This has "Black Mirror Episode" written all over it.

This is all amazing stuff. The future of the human race is very Xsighting to me. Hope one day my consciousness can be recorded. I would love to be able to Thought to TeXt. Very positive things. Mr.X

Great thanks for sharing 👍

Amazing

Awesome!...but it freaks me out how easily this can be weaponized....the more i think about it..the more i feel we need to understand us more as a species & work to build in safeguards in whatever technology or innovation that we come up with...it should be part of the 'design' or 'infrastructure' rather than an after thought, not because i am a pessimist with a reticence to change but because i am a realist who sees the value of anthropology & the lessons it teaches us about us.

On off keying with binary switches and sampling is a slow process.. can I plug it in to my CB radio to do Cw?

really don't want to directly tweet from my brain.

i always wanted development in that field and now it is happening

Instead of using pre-existing signals new signals should be created, that way there is no overlap if there are people that have some things disabled and some enabled.

Ty 4 this vid & this tech, theyre both amazin! Its just incredibly sad that stephen hawking died b4 this tech (& other adv bionics) were released.

This is a wonderful technology for folks with disabilities, of course. This kind of tech would never get developed were it not for the ambition to grant them dignity and ease. Still - we MUST remain skeptical of widespread use of technologies like these. "Throwing" your emotions to someone else for a moment sounds like the basis for peace on earth, but I like to think about what would happen alongside that mainstream adoption. Even if only 2,500 surgeons can perform the operation necessary to install it today, who is to say that celebrities and the rich adopting this tech wouldn't cause overwhelming demand for more surgeons? And if that happened, the pressure for the public to adopt it would skyrocket just like it has for smartphones - everyone's gotta have one. Our data already gets sold without our consent to the highest bidders and used to manipulate us today. Giving them even deeper access into our psychologies would be catastrophic for humanity.

Imagine how much faster Stephen Hawking can roast people

Seeing this makes me surely hope, that my dream of having some headgear that's linked to a computer with a special program that can make movies and everything directly from my mind. I basicly think about what i want, and the program just takes this picture from my brain and makes a movie with it.

There are people who are highly connected to other humans and can actually know and feel how another is feeling without this in your vessels or brain. Untapped with others and feelings of another.

When will this be available for ALS patients and how do we enroll for clinical trials?

a big help for people with cerebral palsy too

Crazy comments on here about mind control and mind reading. This is not meant to diminish the awesomeness of the device, but it's simply an interface. It would be like suggesting you could read my mind if you hacked my mouse. You might be able to make my mouse act wonky but you wouldn't know what I was thinking.

Amazing tech that can help so many people however expressing emotion and learning how to should not need to be mediated through technology.

What happens if they start getting used carelessly and implant in people without them knowing how would they be able to detect if they were implanted and who would keep these from being used in a bad way

WOW. Truly amazing stuff guys, keep up the great work, imagine the next 10-20yrs, lets all band together and fix some of these problems ♥🧠

Could they make a cap for the head that would do the same thing? Could it be used to help someone in a coma to express they are still there?

so beautiful! 🤩 .... Just praying that it will NOT be used to control humanity in a seemingly negative way !

Truly amazing

They certainly put a lot of effort into technology. Image if they worked as hard on peace love and understanding. Hopefully I will die before they force these things on us.

imagine you could transmit thoughts without converting them to text... there would be no longer a need to talk and listen or read and write. no more misunderstandings..

I haven't watched this video yet. This is the first video I'm watching to see about using your mind to text notes. The reason is because I had a thought about something and wanted to look it up. By the time I opened Google, I forgot what I wanted to look up. But if my thoughts were sent to my device in text, I could have we t back a d remembered what I wanted to look up. Also it would have to be affordable lol.

What the text doesn't capture is the feeling with respect to the state of mind that produced it. "Oh that feels good" says the client getting their neck messaged. And the corresponding text? It does not carry the pleasurable state it is derived from. I like this aspect of our minds. And I like writing even though it doesn't capture the stimulus it entertains. That's a good thing, we humans write some f***** up scenarios lol.

This is amazing, when it's used the right way like this

It's a sad fact that with such amazing and helpful technology we have to worry about the worst thing that someone could do with it and basically have to do a pros and cons list for things that are life changing. I wish that humans weren't as selfish and power obsessed as they are.

Very Nice 👌👌👌

Yeah , I love you all!

Can we attach this to animals and find out what they are thinking?

I think this would be great in another way. In cbt, therapist teach their patients to recognise how their feelings and thoughts impact their behaviours, and how their behaviours directly influence their thoughts/feelings. I think it would be great if it advanced to a stage where people and professionals can see look at the thoughts in a more black and white format, for better treatment/self awareness! After all 80% of your thoughts are negative, so why not break down and analyse why. That though can implicate issues we have never been prepared for. -Nya, a regular joe

advertising company: NICE!!

no throwing feelings to another has its drawback sometimes it could even make you addicted like what happens if a person with too much happiness transfers his happiness to the one who have never known happiness or what if a person that has lost all life kills millions just by transferring his depression to a train operator or something

Is it really used for stroke,spinal injury or to decieve , control,and use as weapon against some groups ,country etc 🤔who in their rigth mind would agree to such

Great,

I am from India. I have been unethically a victim of this brain computer interface technology from last one year till now. At the beginning i could not find how the people around me sense my actions. Later i got to know that they are identifying my movements as per my thoughts and trying to give stress and depression to me. I wondered how they could findy thoughts. Some of them are hearing my thoughts just with the help of smartphone and headset. Some of them even doesn't carry smart phone but they could hear. Another surprisingly, they could conversate with me, which is irritating. Day by day, the things become serious. I browsed in website about this issue for long time to fix the problem actually what it is. But i could not know how to solve this issue. I dont know how to stop others from accessing my thoughts. I cried, shouted, fighted from my thoughts itself. Even i could not share this to anyone. Parents were illiterate, financially unsupported, and literally now i am imbalance due to my mental issue. Even i could not make a complaint to police regarding this matter. From my side of research i just come to know through some implants or any non invasive material, they could monitor my thoughts. But how to find what is that exact tech, how to remove from my body ? If rightly not that, what would be the way that everyone could easily track my thoughts, how to stop it?.. I am completely unsupported. Even I tried to attempt suicide. But my inner thoughts never allowed to happen it. I struggled against them and doing it day by day. I cannot concentrate in my job. The number of users who disturbing me is increasing daily whomsoever i didn't see in my life. A supportless, financially unstable, mentally illness, unethically suffering from depression' Youngster from India humbly request to this world of ethical people, who ethically believe that this intervention of cognitive liberty is brutally wrong, to support me to survive by getting rid off this problem.🙏

I need that in the future!

the most beautiful technology

when I saw the Stentrode sparkling at 7:24 i wanted to cry. Its beautiful.

They’ve created the social media, people obviously got used to it. Now, there’s people who can’t, for example, type using their fingers, due to some problems they have and it’s always great to see people working on things that’ll make it easier for them, but what if someone loses their thinking ability because of the technology you might create in the future, are you guys going to make a thought producer? This is getting dangerous, but there’s levels to it, that’s the reason we don’t pay attention to the bad parts, we focus on good things always, and we’re so happy that people like this, get their help needed. This is getting dangerous, we’re going to get to a point where we’ll try to reach a level of God, and that’ll destroy us. Stop please

This is cool but also a little scary.

Congrats 👏👏

Here we go

In the wrong hands, this could be dreadful. Personal space and privacy could be destroyed

this is so near to become popular as flying cars, (2075, I guess?), but great breakthrough tho

Could use it for comma patients, I'm sure they have some cognitive abilities... possibly.

Like a lot of people, I think this would be a dangerous slippery slope if marketed widely. But asides from that, I would have been sceptical that something like this could be done, and I wonder exactly what signals are being read by these BCIs. From what I've heard, there's no distinct neural pattern associated with the perception of blue, so does the BCI read the neural beginnings of the specific fine motor control necessary to articulate the word? I would have thought that would exclude people who have never been able to speak. Oh, I think he just explained it - so you imagine typing a letter on an on-screen keyboard? That makes a bit more sense, I think.

this is like science fiction called starset

I wish this technology would have existed 15 years ago. My father had suffered ASL, and died 10 years ago. I could never know how much suffering he had undergone through because he could not communicate with us. I can imagine…. Thank you for your efforts … one day people like my father can….

think of the implications for stroke patients!

I remember this Black Mirror Episode...

With this tech, the thought police might actually be a reality.

Humans must understand This is a threat to themselves as well as rest of humanity.. Why would we need to know someone's thought..

What could possibly go wrong?

Couldn't you reroute those signals to their intended destination and therefore bypass paralysis?

Great work!

Surveillance State said 'Happy days ......No need to spend money on actual ,physical prisons anymore'.

thats breakthrough and in the future , maybe we have a game like sword art online

May be like "Pacific Rim"thing

R.I.p. to all the poor monkeys that have to die for these experiments 🙏🏻

Everyone is going to get canceled, lol.

That's amazing

THE FUTURE IS NOW

I obey. Daleks are supreme.

Wonderful at one hand, scary on the other

I’m guessing that most of these thoughts will be uploaded to the cloud and the disabled person will need to agree to Ts & Cs.