Brain Waves to Words: Breakthrough Lets Scientists (Almost) Hear What You're
  Thinking 
From: PCWorld - 02/01/2012
By: Matt Peckham

A team of researchers at the University of California Berkeley has figured
out how your brain sorts all  spoken syllables and pitch frequencies into
signals that are instantly translated as language — call it a metaphorical
decoder wheel for the brain's linguistic centers. What's more, they've been
able to reproduce words someone heard simply by monitoring electrical
activity in the brain region associated with the process. The study, titled
"Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex," was just published in the
journal PLoS Biology. 

 Imagine the benefits to someone who can't speak. Doctors could fit them with
 implants capable of selectively monitoring brain activity and converting it
 into spoken language piped to a totable audio system. 

"This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because
of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said Robert Knight, one
of the study's coauthors and director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience
Institute at the University of California. "If you could eventually
reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people
could benefit."  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/249123/brain_waves_to_words_breakthrough_lets_scientists_almost_hear_what_youre_thinking.html

Links:
Translating Brain Waves to Reconstruct Sounds and Conversations You've Heard
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/decoding-brain-waves-could-let-doctors-hear-what-we-hear-—-and-maybe-what-we-think

Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

Robert Knight
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/faculty?id=knight

Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/