A device newly created by MIT research renders the intrinsic extrinsic. Worn on the face, the gadget processes and reads the neuromuscular signals that the act of subvocalization — the “practice of silently saying words in your head” — activates.

Electrodes implanted in the technology work in conjunction with the bone-conduction headphones that serve as the base of the device to read the signals sent when the user internally verbalizes. Bone-conduction headphones use the vibrations that are transmitted to the bones of the user’s inner ear, sans ear canal obstruction. The technology then forwards the signals to a computer that records the words through its reliance on neural networks. The device has currently been used for a myriad of purposes conducted in complete silence, like asking for the time.

“The motivation for this was to build an IA device, an intelligence-augmentation device,” said Arnav Kapur, the MIT grad student and lead author of the project.

“Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?”

It appears that the answer is a resounding “yes.”

H/T: engadget

Tags: MIT, researchers, subvocalization

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