[exo-pla-net]

This is Ouija board pseudoscience until proven otherwise. The scientist behind it is already disgraced. If there is any element of "assistance" in interpreting the locked-in patient's brain waves, the wishful thinking of the assistant likely fudges the results to create a fake message, exactly like an Ouija board. Scams like this pop up every few years, preying on desperate, sad people. See "facilitated communication".

[lqet]

I am not so sure, judging from the German press coverage, it seems that this study is regarded as vindication for Birbaumer and Chaudhary. The patient didn't just answer yes/no questions as in the original study, but produced whole sentences. Also, this isn't a situation where it is not even clear if the patient is brain-dead or not - the patient has ALS sind 2015, is in his early 30ies, and was communicating through his eye movement until this also stopped working just a few years ago. So he is most likely fully conscious.

[a-dub]

monkeys have been moving cursors around on screens (or more elaborate physical or virtual effectors) using cortical implants for nearly 20 years now. the experiments that are published when they do this are well designed. target placements are randomized, task performance establishes irrefutable control- sometimes believed to be as a result of learning how to modulate neural activity to drive the system, and sometimes believed to be a result of passive listening (and learning) of non-adapted neural activity.

it is likely very possible to do what they have claimed to have done.

the big problem has often been intersession stability. some days are good, some days are bad and some days don't work at all.

[dalbasal]

...those are the days that never end.

[freeflight]

There are over a dozen people involved with this, disregarding them all because of one controversial incident with one of them feels a bit extreme. In terms of methodology it does not strike me as very Ouija boardy as all patient input is in the form of Yes/No responses [0];

> We also validated the Yes/No responses in a question paradigm, in which the answers were assumed to be known to the patient.

> Finally, in an auditory speller paradigm, the patient could select letters and words using the previously trained Yes/No approach.

As somebody working in the German medical sector, I'm also pretty certain that the BfArM ain't casually greenlighting scam brain surgeries/implants. Nor am I sure how any of the researchers are supposed to scam the patient, or their family, with this?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8

[exo-pla-net]

Yeah, less than half of sessions yielded "intelligible" output.

From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation, as was seen with Koko the gorilla and the claims that she could talk, when in fact she was just spouting gibberish that her handlers would interpret.

I anticipate more scientists are going to become disgraced as this study is scrutinized by peers.

But, hey, I hope I'm wrong. It would indeed be nice to talk to locked-in loved ones.

[Kliment]

The full event streams have been published this time around, including the failed sessions. I recommend reading the article and watching the videos of the system operating - they have a video of the input calibration/training, and another video of the longest session. The sessions are few and many days apart, and not all of them demonstrate successful control, but on the days where the patient can successfully drive the system there is no doubt of the communication method's authenticity, and the researchers have no input or interpretation capability.

The previous controversy around the researchers is not about them scamming patients, it's about them publishing only the positive results of their work and not disclosing negative results, making the average success rate appear better. This is one reason they publish full event streams and list days with no attempts and failed attempts extensively in this paper. The code has also been published, and the raw potential recordings are available on request. I had a careful read and I can't find anything methodologically problematic in this publication. When you watch the video, be aware this is the longest and most successful session, and the researchers made this very clear.

[bnegreve]

I am also skeptic of the whole thing, but they say this:

> After 12 further days, the patient was able to reliably increase or decrease his neural activity to hit one of two “target” tones.

Isn't that evidence that this is not random noise?

The only thing that could be left to human interpretation is the "increase of activity" (I'm assuming "activity" is a signal with high dimensionality). But it is easy enough to build some metric, and demonstrate the answers are not random.

I have just enough faith in peer reviewing to hope that the paper would have been rejected without this experiment.

[wolverine876]

> Yeah, less than half of sessions yielded "intelligible" output. / From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation ...

The first doesn't infer the second. It infers the opposite: They are eliminating unintelligible results.

[thaumasiotes]

> There are over a dozen people involved with this, disregarding them all because of one controversial incident with one of them feels a bit extreme.

One controversial incident? This is an extremely common type of scam. There's always somebody claiming they can speak to your comatose or deceased loved one, and they're always scamming you. No, the coma communicators aren't more reliable than the ghost communicators. No, there is no reason you would ever expect someone in this field to be telling the truth, particularly not when they've been caught running the same scam in the past.

[ManuelKiessling]

The guy is not in coma – did you even read the paper?

[thaumasiotes]

He is in a coma in the sense that's relevant here:

> the patient, who was unable to move any muscles or even open his eyes

[zaarn]

That is not a coma, the brain has remained functional and isn't shut down like in a coma. The patient has ALS not something that degrades brain functionality itself.

[thaumasiotes]

None of that is relevant in any way. The patient's behavior is the same; it attracts the same scam, because the scam is premised solely on the behavior of not talking. Nobody cares why the person isn't talking. Autistic patients attract this scam too.

[wolverine876]

> There's always somebody claiming they can speak to your comatose or deceased loved one

That's a common scam? Where is that documented?

Even if it is, this report has evidence to the contrary.

[Syntonicles]

It's been years since I looked into this stuff. I remember a story about someone with locked-in syndrome using eye-blinks to communicate letter-by-letter, or with yes/no answers. I remember they purportedly wrote a book.

Was that also discredited? Is there any standing evidence of communication by the locked-in?

[a-dub]

the existing state of the art is called the "p300 speller" and i believe it's been around for decades.

the user has a screen in front of them where the alphabet is cycled through at about 0.5 ch/s. scalp electrodes detect a signal associated with novelty or surprise allowing the user to spell out communications, very slowly.

edit: the cycling is in random order, thus exploiting the p300 surprise signal when the right character is highlighted. there's also some manipulation of spatial location to enhance the evocation of the signal.

[tsol]

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That wasn't discredited. They were able to blink, and using a second person reciting the alphabet he dictated his book

[rurban]

The science behind not, but the movie was discredited. It was a whitewash by his ex-wife over his girlfriend. The director fell for it. excellent movie though, even if you cannot trust anything the wife said.

[wolverine876]

The parent comment is a fabrication. They provide no evidence of these events, while the OP provides extensive evidence to the contrary.