The work parallels research published this fall from U.C. Berkeley in another sensory realm—a computational model that reconstructed the images that subjects were watching in movie trailers.

An obvious follow-up question about Pasley and his colleagues' research: Will this make it possible to read words that we silently vocalize to ourselves, for example, "Oh no, not him again." Pasley explains that the research applies to actual sound a listener hears. Whether the same regions of the brain are involved in the words we sub-vocalize remains unclear.

The experiment demonstrates, though, that it does not take a mind reader to listen in on the subtle processing of the brain at work.

1 Comments

1. 1. Tucker M 06:19 PM 1/31/12

   This is incredibly exciting. There are so many seriously disabled people out there who are fiercely intelligent, yet incapable of expressing themselves (and therefore assumed unintelligent) due to severe physical or motor-control constraints. We all know of those who've been fortunate enough to get the assistance they need to express themselves through computers or other language devices...but those devices all have to be learned in a very non-organic manner, and require educated and financially resourceful people to help get them set up and trained. How miraculous it would be, to create a device that would help the disabled speak with their inner voice.

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