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Chang has brought people out of locked-in syndrome to speak through AI, and he is a bioengineer as well. A movement of less than a millimeter in the wrong direction could cost a patient's life, which makes him one of the calmest people around. People in life-or-death fields have ways to calm down in real time.
That calm pointed a neuroscience lab toward a problem. Around 2016, a significant portion of the lab turned to finding real-time tools for mitigating stress. Its researchers spent time with special operations personnel, who spend a lot of time in cold water in SEAL training, though not in ice baths, and with neurosurgeons who handle life-or-death circumstances for years and maintain immense calm.
The work led to a study of about a hundred people comparing four kinds of five-minute daily practices, and to a pattern of breathing that calms a person right away.
How can a patient stay awake during brain surgery?
The brain itself has no pain receptors, so after the scalp and skull are numbed, a patient can talk while the surgeon works. Surgeons use mild electrical stimulation to find speech areas, and ask the patient to name pictures while they probe. If speech stops when a spot is stimulated, that area is spared. Wilder Penfield, working in Montreal in the mid-twentieth century, pioneered this approach and mapped much of the cortex with it.
How does AI help paralyzed people speak?
In 2021, Chang's lab reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that a man paralyzed by a brainstem stroke could spell out words from electrodes laid on the surface of his brain. A 2023 paper in Nature described a woman who, after a stroke, produced speech at nearly 80 words a minute through a digital avatar. The decoder learned patterns of brain activity linked to attempted speech. Normal conversation runs at about 150 words a minute.