Is it a military weapon or a medical angel?

I believe that each of us will have such an experience Even in noisy environment, we can accurately recognize familiar sounds It seems like a common event, but there is a long-term scientific problem behind it: how can the brain's auditory center amplify and decode a sound at lightning speed? Recently, a team from the school of neural engineering at Columbia University revealed the brain mechanism behind this phenomenon, and published their results in the journal Neuron In addition, Dr NIMA mesgarani announced the development of a new hearing aid based on this research This hearing aid uses brain computer interface (BCI) to convert brain wave mode to speech with the help of speech synthesizer https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.007 As early as 2012, the team of Dr NIMA mesgarani of the Brain Research Institute of Mortimer B Zuckerman at Columbia University has found that the human brain is selective to the sounds it hears When a person listens to others, their brain waves change to recognize the speaker's voice characteristics and ignore other sounds There is a magic area in the brain - auditory cortex When the disordered sound waves of the external world transmit signals to the brain through the inner ear, the auditory cortex can accurately pick out meaningful information from the disordered sound and transmit it to the brain There are layers in the auditory cortex, each layer decodes the sound in different degrees There are two hierarchies: transverse temporal gyrus (Hg) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) The researchers found that information from the inner ear first reached Hg and then through it to STG Dr NIMA mesgarani and James O'Sullivan The researchers found some epileptics, some of whom needed regular brain surgery Dr NIMA mesgarani and Dr James O'Sullivan monitored brain waves in the Hg or STG regions by implanting electrodes into patients The purpose of the electrodes is to help researchers distinguish between the two cerebral cortex, Hg and STG, in decoding sound Neural response in epileptic patients Data shows that Hg has created a rich and multi-dimensional mixed voice, and each voice is displayed at different frequencies In this area of Hg, the brain will "treat all voices equally", not showing a preference for a certain voice, but treat each voice equally However, the data collected from STG seems to tell a very different story By weighing the signals emitted by Hg, STG area will filter out some sounds, leaving a frequency of sound for amplification Performance of auditory objects in Hg and STG To sum up, these findings reveal the division of responsibility between the two areas of auditory cortex: Hg for coding, and STG for selection And all this happens in about 150 milliseconds, which is a blink of an eye for human beings In addition, the researchers found other effects of STG After the selection, STG area will form an impression of one voice Even if the voice is covered by another speaker (for example, when two people talk to each other), STG can still represent the required speaker as a unified whole, independent of the volume of competing voice New hearing aids bring good news to deaf patients The information collected in this study can be used as the basis of artificial simulation of this biological process algorithm, and then it can be better used in hearing aids Earlier this year, Dr mesgarani and his team announced the development of a brain controlled hearing aid, a boon for deaf or epileptic patients It is understood that the newly developed hearing aid with brain computer interface has the same technology as apple Siri, and can answer questions in daily life orally Researchers plan to study the activities of Hg and STG in more and more complex scenes with more speakers or visual cues These efforts will help to provide detailed and accurate images of how each area of the auditory cortex works It is worth mentioning that this technology is a research result of DARPA In cooperation with military users, DARPA has improved personalized learning (PAL) for combat purposes, and worked with the defense procurement community to transform pal technology into military systems Do you think Dr mesgarani's hearing aid, which uses BCI and vocoder to convert brain waves into speech, will be used for military or medical care first? reference material: [1] How the brain dials up the volume to hear someone in a crowd