Neuro-X seminar: Prof Nitin Tandon - From speech to language BCI

Implantable speech BCIs have shown that intended articulation can be translated into words for people with paralysis. Aphasia poses a different challenge: the networks that turn ideas into language may themselves be injured, even when meaningful thoughts remain. I will describe how intracranial recordings reveal the distributed dynamics of speech production and trace representations of meaning from single words through phrases, sentences, and discourse. By combining broad network coverage with recordings at the level of individual neurons, we aim to identify which aspects of language survive injury and where they can be accessed. These findings point toward a new class of BCIs that decode residual semantic representations to help people with aphasia.