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With advances in electronics and neuroscience, researchers have been able to achieve remarkable things with brain implant devices. In addition to restoring physical senses, scientists are also seeking innovative ways to ____ communication for those who have lost the ability to speak. A new “decoder” receiving data from an electronic device implanted inside the skull, for example, might help paralyzed patients speak using only their minds. Researchers from the University of California developed a two-stage method to turn brain ____ into computer-synthesized speech.

For years, scientists have been trying to control and use neutral inputs to give a voice back to people whose neurological damage prevents them from talking. Until now, many of these brain-computer interfaces have ____ a letter-by-letter approach, in which patients move their eyes or facial ____ to spell out their thoughts. But these types of interfaces are very slow - most max out producing 10 words per minute, a fraction of human’s average speaking speed of 150 words per minute.

The brain is undamaged in these patients, but the neurons - the pathways that ____ your arms, or your mouth, or your legs are broken down. These people have high cognitive functioning and abilities, but they cannot accomplish ____ tasks like moving about or saying anything, “says a co-lead author of the new study and an associate research specializing in neurological surgery at UCSF.” We are essentially by passing the pathway that’s broken down.“

The researchers started with high-resolution brain activity data collected from five volunteers over several years. These participants - all of whom had normal speech function - were already undergoing a ____ process for epilepsy(癫痫)treatment that involved implanting electrodes(电极)directly into their brains. The research team used these electrodes to ____ activity in speech-related areas of the brain as the patients read off hundreds of sentences.

From there, the UCSF team worked out a two-stage process to recreate the spoken sentences. First, they created a decoder to ____ the recorded activity patterns as instructions for moving parts of a virtual vocal tract(声道). They then developed a synthesizer that used the ____ movements to produce language.

Other research has tried to decode words and sounds directly from neural signals, ____ the middle step of decoding movement. However, a study the UCSF researchers published last year suggests that your brain’s speech center focuses on how to move the vocal tract to produce sounds, ____ what the resulting sounds will be.

Using this method, the researchers successfully reverse-engineered words and sentences from brain activity that ____ matched the audio recordings of participants’ speech. When they asked volunteers on an online crowd-sourcing platform to attempt to ____ the words and sentences using a word bank, many of them could understand the simulated(模拟的)speech, though their ____ was far from perfect. Out of 101 synthesized sentences, about 80 percent were perfectly transcribed(记录)by at least one listener using a 25-word bank.