• toiletobserver@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language

  • badbytes@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Spent over 15yrs studying brain activity in EEG MRI and MEG. Seems like a far stretch, given our ability to accurately access signals. Brain is complicated, and signals like EEG are very poor reflector of specific signals. Like when you view city street lights at night. Pretty, but what can you decipher.

  • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    With further refinement, DeWave could help stroke and paralysis patients communicate and make it easier for people to direct machines like bionic arms or robots.

    The article doesn’t even hint at any use in a justice system. There’s nothing to suggest that this could even in principle be used as a lie detector.

  • TheWonderfool@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Ignoring the technology itself, I found it interesting that it has a lot less trouble with verbs compared to nouns (tho the article does not give much information about it).

    Would it mean that humans keeps actions very separate (even if similar), while keeping things and concepts more clustered together? Is being precise on what is happening much more important than clearly specifying the subject and object of the action?

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I’d wager that humans have much more neural hardware relating to verbs, since they relate to the things you yourself do over longer periods. Let’s say I clean my bathroom, or my kitchen, or something else - the actions I take are very similar, and my head has to keep my body doing the right thing for long stretches of time. It’s much harder to clean the wrong thing than to clean the thing wrong.

    • Belgdore@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      There are fewer verbs than nouns I’m sure our brains prioritize accordingly

  • phubarr@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is definitely progress, but we need to keep in mind that the particular language a person speaks can significantly influence how a person’s brain works.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    So is it only useful for people who silently read? Because I don’t see any use case if so, it is not like we think using words, lol.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Later on they find the accuracy is about as good as the whole facial recognition fiasco

  • gregorum@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    anyone remember the movie Strange Days? Or the movie Brainstorm?

  • A_A@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Eventually this will streamline justice systems : freeing innocents and punishing culprits. At least it will be a powerful tool, just like DNA analysis before it and digital prints were also groundbreaking.