The US Army invests in communication between the brain and the computer

Communication between humans and a computer system today mainly involves the use of a keyboard or a tactile interface, and possibly by voice. The machine communicates with man via a screen, and possibly by sound, in particular with a synthetic voice. But in a combat environment, sound like the use of hands, or even the use of a screen, may not be possible, or at least they may be unwise. For researchers at the University of Southern California, the solution could be based on interfacing between the machine and the brain!

At least, this is the ultimate objective that teams belonging to several American but also British university research laboratories have set themselves, in a project funded by the US Army. For now, the results obtained may seem far removed from the reading of thought, since scientists have managed to separate, in a neural interface, motor signals from other signals in the brain. However, this is the first essential step to achieve it. Because detecting and analyzing the cerebral flows of conscious thought is similar, today, to trying to learn an unknown language at the crossroads of a highway and a landing strip of a large airport. First of all, it was therefore necessary to eliminate all spurious messages, so that only the relevant signals had to be analyzed.

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