Month: May 2023

Scientists Use Brain Scans and AI to ‘Decode’ Thoughts

Scientists said Monday they have found a way to use brain scans and artificial intelligence modeling to transcribe “the gist” of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading.

While the main goal of the language decoder is to help people who have lost the ability to communicate, the U.S. scientists acknowledged that the technology raised questions about “mental privacy.”

Aiming to assuage such fears, they ran tests showing that their decoder could not be used on anyone who had not allowed it to be trained on their brain activity over long hours inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

Previous research has shown that a brain implant can enable people who can no longer speak or type to spell out words or even sentences.

These “brain-computer interfaces” focus on the part of the brain that controls the mouth when it tries to form words.

Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of a new study, said his team’s language decoder “works at a very different level.”

“Our system really works at the level of ideas, of semantics, of meaning,” Huth told an online press conference.

It is the first system to be able to reconstruct continuous language without an invasive brain implant, according to the study in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

‘Deeper than language’

For the study, three people spent a total of 16 hours inside an fMRI machine listening to spoken narrative stories, mostly podcasts such as The New York Times’ “Modern Love.”

This allowed the researchers to map out how words, phrases and meanings prompted responses in the regions of the brain known to process language.

They fed this data into a neural network language model that uses GPT-1, the predecessor of the AI technology later deployed in the hugely popular ChatGPT.

The model was trained to predict how each person’s brain would respond to perceived speech, then narrow down the options until it found the closest response.

To test the model’s accuracy, each participant then listened to a new story in the fMRI machine.

The study’s first author, Jerry Tang, said the decoder could “recover the gist of what the user was hearing.”

For example, when the participant heard the phrase, “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” the model came back with, “She has not even started to learn to drive yet.”

The decoder struggled with personal pronouns such as “I” or “she,” the researchers admitted.

But even when the participants thought up their own stories — or viewed silent movies — the decoder was still able to grasp the “gist,” they said.

This showed that “we are decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language,” Huth said.

Because fMRI scanning is too slow to capture individual words, it collects a “mishmash, an agglomeration of information over a few seconds,” Huth said. “So, we can see how the idea evolves, even though the exact words get lost.”

Ethical warning

David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain’s Granada University, which is not involved in the research, said it went beyond what had been achieved by previous brain-computer interfaces.

This brings us closer to a future in which machines are “able to read minds and transcribe thought,” he said, warning this could possibly take place against people’s will, such as when they are sleeping.

The researchers anticipated such concerns.

They ran tests showing that the decoder did not work on a person if it had not already been trained on their own particular brain activity.

The three participants were also able to easily foil the decoder.

While listening to one of the podcasts, the users were told to count by sevens, name and imagine animals or tell a different story in their mind. All these tactics “sabotaged” the decoder, the researchers said.

Next, the team hopes to speed up the process so they can decode the brain scans in real time.

They also called for regulations to protect mental privacy.

“Our mind has so far been the guardian of our privacy,” Rodriguez-Arias said. “This discovery could be a first step towards compromising that freedom in the future.”

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Report: One-Third of US Nurses Plan to Quit Profession

Almost a third of the nurses in the United States are considering leaving their profession after the COVID-19 pandemic left them overwhelmed and fatigued, according to a survey.

The survey of over 18,000 nurses, conducted in January by AMN Healthcare Services Inc., showed on Monday that 30% of the participants are looking to quit their career, up 7 percentage points over 2021, when the pandemic-triggered wave of resignations began.

The survey also showed that 36% of the nurses plan to continue working in the sector but may change workplaces.

“This really underscores the continued mental health and well-being challenges the nursing workforce experiences post pandemic,” AMN Healthcare CEO Cary Grace told Reuters in an interview.

The survey showed there are various changes needed, with 69% of nurses seeking increased salaries and 63% of them seeking a safer working environment to reduce their stress.

This comes at a time that hospital operator and sector bellwether HCA Healthcare Inc. indicated a recovery in the staffing situation.

While a shortage of staff in hospitals has been an issue for a couple of years, it gained traction globally in late 2021 and hit a peak early last year following a large number of resignations due to burnout.

The staffing crisis drove up costs at hospital operators, while boosting profits at medical staffing providers such as AMN Healthcare.

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Aerosmith Announces Farewell Tour Starting in September 

Aerosmith will be touring a city near you for the last time to celebrate the rock band’s 50-plus years together. 

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band announced Monday the dates for their farewell tour called “Peace Out” starting Sept. 2 in Philadelphia. The 40-date run of shows, which includes a stop in the band’s hometown of Boston on New Year’s Eve, will end Jan. 26 in Montreal. 

“I think it’s about time,” guitarist Joe Perry said in an interview with The Associated Press. 

Perry said the group, with frontman Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton, drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford, learned from the staging and production from their recent Las Vegas residency shows. 

Perry believes the time to say goodbye is now, especially with every founding band member over the age of 70. Tyler, 75, is the oldest in the group. 

“It’s kind of a chance to celebrate the 50 years we’ve been out here,” Perry said. “You never know how much longer everybody’s going to be healthy to do this. … It’s been a while since we’ve actually done a real tour. We did that run in Vegas, which was great. It was fun, but (we’re) kind of anxious to get back on the road.” 

Tyler and Perry said the band is looking forward to digging into their lengthy catalog of the group’s rock classics including “Crazy,” “Janie’s Got a Gun” and “Livin’ on the Edge.” 

Over the years, Aerosmith, which formed in 1970, has collected four Grammys. The band broke boundaries intersecting rock and hip-hop with their epic collaboration with Run-DMC for “Walk This Way.” 

Aerosmith performed the Super Bowl halftime show in 2001 and even had their own theme park attraction in 1999 at Disney World in Florida and later in Paris with the launch of the “Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith” ride. 

“We’re opening up Pandora’s Box one last time to present our fans with the Peace Out tour,” Tyler said in a statement to the AP. His “Pandora’s Box” reference calls out Aerosmith’s 1991 three-disc compilation album that covered the band’s output from the 1970s to the early 1980s. 

“Be there or beware as we bring all the toys out of the attic. Get ready,” Tyler added. 

The band said Kramer decided to not take part in the current dates on the upcoming tour. He’s still a part of the group, but the drummer has been on leave to “focus his attention on his family and health” since their Vegas residency last year. Drummer John Douglas will continue to play in his place. 

Perry called Kramer their brother. The band said his “legendary presence behind the drum kit will be sorely missed.” 

Before the 40-date tour wraps, Perry said other cities domestically and internationally could be added. 

“It’s the final farewell tour, but I have a feeling it will go on for a while,” he said. “But I don’t know how many times we’ll be coming back to the same cities. It could very possibly be the last time.” 

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Native American Photographer Tells Indigenous Tribes’ Stories

Ten years ago, Native American photographer Matika Wilbur embarked on a road trip with an ambitious goal to document all 562 federally recognized Indigenous tribes. Her multiyear work culminated in a new book aiming to change the way people see Native Americans. She launched her book tour in her home state of Washington. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya has more from Seattle.

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Study Points to Better Care for Babies Born to Opioid Users

Babies born to opioid users had shorter hospital stays and needed less medication when their care emphasized parent involvement, skin-to-skin contact and a quiet environment, researchers reported Sunday.

Newborns were ready to go home about a week earlier compared to those getting standard care. Fewer received opioid medications to reduce withdrawal symptoms such as tremors and hard-to-soothe crying, about 20% compared to 52% of the standard-care babies.

Babies born to opioid users, including mothers in treatment with medications such as methadone, can develop withdrawal symptoms after exposure in the womb.

Typically, hospitals use a scoring system to decide which babies need medicine to ease withdrawal, which means treatment in newborn intensive care units.

“The mom is sitting there anxiously waiting for the score,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Leslie Young of the University of Vermont’s children’s hospital. “This would be really stressful for families.”

In the new approach — called Eat, Sleep, Console — nurses involve mothers as they evaluate together whether rocking, breastfeeding or swaddling can calm the baby, Young said. Medicine is an option, but the environment is considered too.

“Is the TV on in the room? Do we need to turn that off? Are the lights on? Do we need to turn those down?” Young said.

About 5,000 nurses were trained during the study, published Sunday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers studied the care of 1,300 newborns at 26 U.S. hospitals. Babies born before training were compared to babies born after.

The National Institutes of Health funded the work as part of an initiative to address the U.S. opioid addiction crisis.

“One of the great strengths of the study is its geographic diversity,” said Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the branch that researches child health and human development. “We’ve had newborns enrolled from sites as varied as Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Kansas City, Missouri; and Spartanburg, South Carolina.”

Many U.S. hospitals have adopted the new approach, Bianchi said, adding she hopes the research will lead to recommendations from pediatrics groups.

Researchers followed the babies for three months and found no difference in urgent care or emergency room visits or hospitalizations — reassuring evidence about the safety of shorter hospital stays.

The new approach could yield “tremendous savings” in hospital resources, Young said, although the study didn’t estimate cost.

Researchers will follow the babies until age 2 to monitor their health.

Mothers want to be involved, Young said.

“For the first time, they feel like their role as a mom is valued and like they’re important,” she said. “We know that those first moments of a mom and a baby being together are really critical to bonding.”

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