'Mind-Reading' Headset Lets You Control a Computer with Your Thoughts … Sort Of

Regardless of whether your mouth is moving right now, you are talking to yourself.

As you read these words, the muscles in your larynx, jaw and face are fluttering with quick, imperceptible movements, sounding out the words so you can actually "hear" them in your head. This kind of silent speech is called "subvocalization," and unless you're a speed-reader who has trained yourself out of this habit, you're doing it all day, every time you read or even imagine a word.

Now, MIT researchers want to use those subvocalizations to decode your internal monologue and translate it into digital commands, using a wearable "augmented intelligence" headset called AlterEgo. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

According to a statement from the MIT Media Lab, the device would allow users to send silent commands to the headset simply by thinking of a word. A neural network would translate the muscle movements to speech and do the user's bidding — totally hands- and voice-free.

"The motivation for this was to build an IA device — an intelligence-augmentation device," Arnav Kapur, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper describing the device, said in the statement. "Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?"

A promotional video accompanying the news release shows a student (Kapur) going about his daily routine while wearing the headset, using silent commands to navigate through a TV menu, check the time, tally up prices in the supermarket and, apparently, cheat at the game Go. His opponent is none the wiser.