Brain Implant Restores Man’s Speech

Language and the ability to speak are far more complicated than we take them for, and a recent breakthrough by a group of scientists at the University of California (UC) in San Francisco offers new insight into how implants can assist in speech.

Back in 2021, the UC team of neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence (AI) specialists inserted a brain-computer interface (BCI) into the skull of a patient called “Pancho”, who had suffered a stroke over a decade ago. The ailment left the 36-year-old man paralysed from the neck down and partially mute.

The implanted 128 electrodes were connected directly to the left hemisphere of his brain – the region critical for speech – to measure his neural activity, allowing the electrical signals to be translated into something a computer could understand and help the AI learn through a large language model.

What made this all the more fascinating is that Pancho is bilingual – he could understand and speak both English and Spanish – and the BCI was able to process both with relative ease.

It is theorised that the shared similarities between the two languages enabled the implant to function without error, opening the doors to a new understanding of how bilingualism works in the human brain.

During his training to communicate, he racked up high accuracy in both English and Spanish, enough to engage with the UC team while talking through a computer screen.

Study co-author and neurosurgeon, Edward Chang, believes that future implant technology will have larger studies with more participants and cover many more languages.

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