Figuring out the way the human brain understands and processes speech could be a huge step forward in helping nonverbal people communicate. Scientists have already made progress toward that goal in a study that analyzed the neural activity of 15 people undergoing surgery for epilepsy treatment or brain tumors. The patients wore electrodes that recorded their brain activity when listening to spoken words. Later, the team studied which types of brain activity correlated with aspects of speech like frequency and rhythm. With this data and some specialized software, they were able to reconstruct some of the sounds the patients heard.

Now, a new study measured the neural activity of patients reading words aloud and reading silently to themselves. Again, the researchers used the neural activity to pinpoint which areas of the brain were stimulated by reading the words aloud . Using this road map of sorts, they were able to decode which areas of the brain were active when reading the same words silently. Although the brain patterns differed somewhat between spoken words and internal words, the researchers were still able to reproduce some of the words the patients read to themselves. They could, in effect, kind of read the patients’ minds sometimes.

If the same type of road map were to be constructed for nonverbal people, the initial neural activity measured would have to come from speech that the patient hears, not their own speech. But according to the researchers, this should be easy enough to accomplish – as easy as figuring out how to read a mind can be, anyway. From there, measuring the neural activity of the nonverbal person could allow researchers to understand what that person is thinking.

The research results have been promising, but they are nowhere near advanced enough to build a device to do the decoding (hence our amusing depictions of mind reading helmets). Other types of brain activity still need to be decoded, and algorithms need to be fine-tuned, but we are ever inching closer to the goal of reading each other’s minds. Time to break out the tin-foil hats?

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Soon, teaching your dog to ‘speak’ will be obsolete. They will be able to communicate verbally in English, Spanish, French and even Mandarin. They will wear EEG-style headgear. This is the vision of the Swedish research lab NSID and their post-apocalyptic dog translator No More Woof.

Okay, so the concept isn’t that stark, and it’s one that holds more ground than one would think. In fact, it started out as a kind of joke between NMW project director Tomas Mazetti and his brother. The two wondered what would happen if the consumer-level EEG Epoc was used on their mother’s dog. It was an idea that piqued enough curiosity for Mazetti to order one. Sure enough, brainwaves were produced. “It’s not that complicated,” Mazetti said in an interview with FastCoDesign. “If a dog is really calm, sleepy, or upset, that is extremely easy to see.”

Testing then began at NSID labs, where the EEG was hooked up to an inexpensive processor and portable speaker. It was developed enough for the team to start an Indigogo campaign. No More Woof is still purely in research phase, but a release date has been set for donors.

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Taking your shoes off and throwing away your brand new bottle of water might not be the only hassle you have to deal with when passing through an airport in the near future. In fact, airport authorities might just take to reading your very thoughts to figure out whether you are a harmless passenger or someone intent on causing mayhem in the air. A company called Veritas Scientific is adapting existing technology to this new goal of mind-reading.

The concept involves a helmet with brush-like metal sensors on the inside. These sensors take the place of the gel and electrodes typically used in EEG (electroencephalogram) readings. The wearer is shown various images on a visor inches in front of his or her face, and the EEG measures the level of recognition registered by the brain. The images shown could be anything from a terrorist leader’s face to plans for a bomb or any number of other nefarious objects. When the brain gives of tell-tale, uncontrollable waves indicating recognition, security personnel will know who to pull out of line for questioning.

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People have always been afraid of technology doing scary things like taking over the world or reading our thoughts. A research group at UC Berkeley is actually trying to make that second one happen with technology that combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with computational models to actually see what people are thinking about. It’s the kind of freaky technology that Hollywood blockbusters are made of – and it’s 100% real.

The researchers say that the technique could be used in the future to tap into the minds of coma patients or to share things that no one else can see such as our dreams or memories. But right now, in the infant days of the technology, it can only be used to reconstruct movie trailers the subjects recently watched. Still, taking images from a brain and reconstructing them on a screen is pretty impressive.

To conduct the experiment, the researchers developed a huge database of random YouTube clips. They then associated these clips with brain activity patterns based on previous brain-watching sessions with the fMRI machine. Once the database of images and brainwave activity was established, it was only a matter of feeding brain scans into the software. The software picked out the 100 clips most likely represented by the brainwaves and layered them together into a single video for each scan. We might be a couple of decades away from using this technique to communicate with comatose patients, but this demonstration is so cool it’s spooky.

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What was once the worst fear of every paranoid person out there may well become reality soon enough for the US military. In 2008, the Army awarded a $4 million contract to a team of scientists from three American universities. The goal of the project is the development of helmets that will read and transmit soldiers’ thoughts to each other without the need for vocal interaction – sort of like a radio without a microphone. It may sound like science fiction, but crazily enough, it’s entirely possible. Brain-computer interaction is currently being developed to help paraplegics type, and there is even a commercially available gaming headset controlled by brain waves.

The military system would have to be significantly more complex than a video game-based system, though, and as a result it probably won’t be available for another decade or so. The developers first have to work out how to decode the brain activity associated with speech. At first, the messages from one soldier to another would be rendered in a robotic voice. The Army hopes that eventually, the message can come in the soldier’s own voice and even indicate his position and distance from the recipient, just as if he were actually speaking.

There doesn’t seem to be much reason for the paranoid among us to worry about the military reading our thoughts. The scientists involved in the project insist that you have to be willing in order to transmit a message, and even then it takes some effort to do so. With the huge increase in battlefield security that a device like this could offer soldiers, it’s hard not to get behind it. But when it’s marketed as an add-on for your cell phone, it might be time to get the tin foil hat out.

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