{"id":11278,"date":"2024-08-14T21:12:33","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T21:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=11278"},"modified":"2024-08-14T21:25:18","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T21:25:18","slug":"a-l-s-stole-his-voice-a-i-retrieved-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=11278","title":{"rendered":"A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter.<\/p>\n

By then, A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell\u2019s muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another: going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. \u201cLike a night burglar,\u201d his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.<\/p>\n

But no theft was as devastating to Mr. Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.<\/p>\n

Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell\u2019s brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk\u2019s company Neuralink: connecting people\u2019s brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.<\/p>\n

Yet the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported on Wednesday<\/a> in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech decoders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s very exciting,\u201d said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr. Harrell\u2019s case but has developed different speech implants<\/a>. A device that just years ago \u201cseemed like science fiction,\u201d he said, is now \u201cimproving, getting optimized, so quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Harrell\u2019s team sank into his brain\u2019s outer layer four electrode arrays that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in a separate study<\/a>. Each array\u2019s 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.<\/p>\n

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Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter.By then, A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell\u2019s muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another: going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. \u201cLike a night burglar,\u201d his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.But no theft was as devastating to Mr. Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell\u2019s brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk\u2019s company Neuralink: connecting people\u2019s brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.Yet the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech decoders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.\u201cIt\u2019s very exciting,\u201d said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr. Harrell\u2019s case but has developed different speech implants. A device that just years ago \u201cseemed like science fiction,\u201d he said, is now \u201cimproving, getting optimized, so quickly.\u201dMr. Harrell\u2019s team sank into his brain\u2019s outer layer four electrode arrays that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in a separate study. Each array\u2019s 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11280,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11278"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11281,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11278\/revisions\/11281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}