Stephen J Smith Stephen J Smith Stephen J Smith is a Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Previously, Dr. Smith was Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In 1990, Smith published an article in the journal "Science", which proposed that certain glial cells in the human brain known as astrocytes would be able to communicate through chemical signals, rather than electrical. By utilizing the neurotransmitter glutamate, he was able to show that these cells, which had once been perceived as inert tissue between neurons, in fact were actively communicating with the rest of
Imagined speech intent of providing a foundation for synthetic telepathy. According to DARPA, the project “will allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through neural signals analysis. The brain generates word-specific signals prior to sending electrical impulses to the vocal cords. These imagined speech signals would be analyzed and translated into distinct words allowing covert person-to-person communication.” DARPA's program outline has three major goals: The process for analyzing subjects' "silent speech" is composed of recording subjects’ brain waves, and then using a computer to process the data and determine the content of the subjects' "covert speech". Subject