Researchers Have Created a Device That Can Hear Your Inner Voice
MIT researchers have created a wearable device that can read your internal dialogue with 92 percent accuracy. The device allows users to ask questions and remotely control other devices without saying a word.
The device, called AlterEgo, resembles a jawbone hooking around the ear and attaching to the user’s face between the lip and chin. Using a bone conduction system, it can hear and respond to the wearer’s internal voice through electrodes attached to the skin.
Developed by a team at MIT’s Media Lab, the intention of the device is to seamlessly fuse humans and machines, soon allowing access one’s smartphone without having to physically manipulate it. Team leader, Arnav Kapur, described it as an attempt to develop a computing platform as “an internal extension of our own cognition,” and “intelligence augmentation.”
The device seems to be the first major step toward a transhumanist cognitive enhancement as technology increasingly becomes an extension of our bodies.
When we verbalize internally, we trigger subtle neuromuscular signals. AlterEgo can read these signals through electrodes placed on the skin. The device then responds to the wearer through a bone conduction speaker, eliminating the need for earbuds or headphones.
Bone conduction headphones are an existing technology that have gained popularity over the past few years, though the phenomenon is believed to have been discovered as far back as the 1500s.
In a video demonstrating AlterEgo’s capabilities, its designers claim that their goal is to combine humans and computers so that computing, the internet, and AI would weave into one’s personality to create a “second self.”
With just 15 minutes of customizing the device to an individual, AlterEgo can transcribe internal dialogue with 92 percent accuracy – human voice word accuracy is 95 percent on average. Kapur and his colleagues are working on improving the number of words the device can understand, saying eventually it will achieve full conversational capability.
Currently the device is only able to recognize 20 words and can respond to commands pertaining to chess, basic arithmetic, and simple television remote control functions.
But the technology is promising for future use in noisy and silent environments, as well as for people suffering from speech disabilities. The team will continue to develop the technology while also reducing the number of electrodes connected to the skin from seven to four.
About the Author
The Mystery of Torsion Fields
Russian scientist Nikolai Kozyrev was considered a prodigy. In 1925, at age 17, he published his first scientific paper, which focused on astrophysics and the atmosphere of the sun and other stars. It was met with great acclaim by other scientists.
At age 20, he graduated from the University of Leningrad with degrees in physics and mathematics. By age 28, he was a college professor and distinguished astronomer. To the science community at large, this promising young physicist disappeared for the next 11 years.
Nikolai Kozyrev: Russian Concentration Camps
While Korzyrev was enjoying a successful career as a professor and researcher, Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, was feeling threatened by scientists whom he perceived were independent thinkers. He was concerned they would see through his propaganda program. To prevent this, in 1936, he arrested them and sent them to concentration camps. Nikolai Kozyrev was among those imprisoned. There wasn’t much for him to do during the long 11 years he spent in the camps except to observe, meditate, and think.
During his imprisonment, Kozyrev was enthralled watching bacteria grow and noticed it grew in a perfect spiral. This led him to conclude that all life-forms likely draw off of an unseen spiraling source of energy. This energy is as important to maintenance and growth of life as are “eating, drinking, breathing, and photosynthesis.”
Kozyrev also concluded that this spiraling energy and growth is how time works, with the Earth orbiting in space by way of a “complex spiraling pattern.”
As the Earth rotates on its axis as it orbits the sun, it releases energy, or torsion waves, that propel it through space. The torsion waves travel at speeds faster than the speed of light. These torsion fields are actually “waves of time” which also cause ripples in gravity. Indeed, some scientists now believe that “electromagnetism, gravity and torsion waves are all members of the same family; they are just different forms of ether vibrations.”
