http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/brain-signals-converted-words-speak-person-paralysis > A man unable to speak after a stroke has produced sentences through a system that reads electrical signals from speech production areas of his brain, researchers report today. The approach has previously been used in nondisabled volunteers to reconstruct spoken or imagined sentences. But this first demonstration in a person who is paralyzed “tackles really the main issue that was left to be tackled—bringing this to the patients that really need it,” says Christian Herff, a computer scientist at Maastricht University who was not involved in the new work. > The participant had a stroke more than a decade ago that left him with anarthria—an inability to control the muscles involved in speech. Because his limbs are also paralyzed, he communicates by selecting letters on a screen using small movements of his head, producing roughly five words per minute. To enable faster, more natural communication, neurosurgeon Edward Chang of the University of California, San Francisco, tested an approach that uses a computational model known as a deep-learning algorithm to interpret patterns of brain activity in the sensorimotor cortex, a brain region involved in producing speech. The approach has so far been tested in volunteers who have electrodes surgically implanted for nonresearch reasons such as to monitor epileptic seizures.