Telepathy has arrived - A scientific breakthrough

Imagine this, you wake up to a pleasant morning after being tucked away into a good night's sleep. Now it’s time to get going for the new day. You think of getting up in a swoosh just to keep that energy going but…. you don't have any sensation in your legs, arms, or torso. It feels like that push, the energy you felt didn't translate into anything. You lie there contemplating what just happened!

120,000 people across the world, every year, are living this reality. They are imprisoned in their own body. In medical terms, a locked-in state (LIS). Remember the days when everyone poured ice water over their heads. Well, you get the drift, I’m talking about ALS. The virality of the campaign is deemed to be self-congratulatory. The campaign did flood a lot of donations into the care of ALS patients and awareness about the disease. Care, not cure.

For the uninitiated, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. The cause of this disease is unknown, and the cure has not been discovered yet.?

To put it simply, no voluntary or involuntary muscle movements. The person can’t speak, swallow or in the worst case breathe on his own. But there’s a catch, the mind is highly active, only the body isn't. The motor functions are void but the person has the capacity to think like a normal being. That just makes it even more daunting. A mind crippled with its inability to control its own body.

Scientists have been using technology to establish communication with people diagnosed with ALS. The most common of which is eye movements and gaze control. The patient’s ability to move eyes, and twitch face muscles as a form to communicate.

But the haunt doesn't stop here, once the affected individual loses the control to communicate reliably or cannot open their eyes voluntarily anymore, no existing assistive technology has been able to provide voluntary communication in this completely locked-in state (CLIS). There, right there, all communication is lost. The patient’s mind though is as active as you and me.

Not all hope is lost.

And this story is about breakthrough research that enables patients in CLIS to communicate their thoughts. Enter telepathy? Stick with me, this gets interesting as it goes.

The star of this story is an ALS patient whose name is unknown for privacy reasons. Diagnosed in 2015, he used an eye tracker for communication. He knew this method would be temporary until he had the vision. Post that, he needed his family to figure out ways to communicate with him.

So his family consulted brain scientists named Neils Birbaumer and Ujwal Chaudhary.

They had a method to implement for which they needed to get to the brain cells through the skull. To restore communication in CLIS, this participant was implanted with chips in two motor cortex areas. These chips have 64 microelectrodes in them. These electrodes pick up signals of brain activity directly.

Neurons that are brain cells pass information through electric impulses. So if this chip were inside your brain, it could pick signals that insinuate movements, thoughts, responses, etc.

One day after the implantation, attempts were initiated to establish communication. The patient was asked to use his previously effective communication strategy employing eye movements to respond to questions with known “yes” and “no” answers.

It did not result in classifiable neural signals. Nothing worked out. Remember, all that these scientists could have from the patient's end were his thoughts. Thoughts that would translate into electric spikes and they needed to make sense of, in order to communicate with the patient. (Of course, the patient can hear, the challenge is to hear him)

On the 86th day, comes the 'AHA' moment. Niels Birbaumer tries an unusual route. He thinks of using an auditory neurofeedback paradigm for communication.

Let’s break down that centipede of a word. In this technique, the patient is fed real-time activity of what’s happening in his brain through sound. Whatever he’s thinking is picked up by the chip, the electric signals are modulated into audio signals and played back for him.

Both the parties are sort of meeting in the middle. The audio signals are more comprehensible for the patient to understand what thought varies the pitch and results in what sound.

He can then modulate these audio signals by using his thoughts. Think of something that will elicit a high frequency or something on the low.

So the first objective is to get the patient to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Establish very basic objective communication. So here’s how it's done.

The patient is given a target note, say a high note or a low note. He then has to match the sound using his thoughts. Every time he does the match, he gets a reward note like a cha-ching. Kind of priming his brain to keep understanding how to match these complex notes and modulate them accurately.

If he matches the target note with a high frequency the answer is yes. If he matches it with a lower frequency it is a no.

When he started to get 80% of this exercise right, they moved into the second phase. Spellings. Here the patient responds ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to specific letters. Thereby formulating words, sentences, and entire expressions.

Following this tedious process of validating each letter to form words and then meaningful sentences, know what he said?

“I want goulash soup”

“I want to listen to a rock band”

“I want my head up, mom”

“My biggest wish is a new bed and that tomorrow I come with you for the barbecue”

The experiment went over the course of 462 days.

And it stated an essential truth about patients undergoing ALS. Especially those who are in completely locked-in state. The truth is, they have a very high ‘quality of life' just like you and me.

Both scientists have faced backlash for their previous research in the same field. So much so that Niels Birbaumer had to leave his country. His reason is, that there are strong forces rallying for the liberalization of euthanasia and mercy killing. This study is a slap on their face.

That's about the story, we might be even on the cusp of inventing telepathy.

Editorial text?is written based on the writer's understanding. For a more direct interpretation read the paper here.

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