it is likely very possible to do what they have claimed to have done.
the big problem has often been intersession stability. some days are good, some days are bad and some days don't work at all.
> We also validated the Yes/No responses in a question paradigm, in which the answers were assumed to be known to the patient.
> Finally, in an auditory speller paradigm, the patient could select letters and words using the previously trained Yes/No approach.
As somebody working in the German medical sector, I'm also pretty certain that the BfArM ain't casually greenlighting scam brain surgeries/implants. Nor am I sure how any of the researchers are supposed to scam the patient, or their family, with this?
From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation, as was seen with Koko the gorilla and the claims that she could talk, when in fact she was just spouting gibberish that her handlers would interpret.
I anticipate more scientists are going to become disgraced as this study is scrutinized by peers.
But, hey, I hope I'm wrong. It would indeed be nice to talk to locked-in loved ones.
> After 12 further days, the patient was able to reliably increase or decrease his neural activity to hit one of two “target” tones.
Isn't that evidence that this is not random noise?
The only thing that could be left to human interpretation is the "increase of activity" (I'm assuming "activity" is a signal with high dimensionality). But it is easy enough to build some metric, and demonstrate the answers are not random.
I have just enough faith in peer reviewing to hope that the paper would have been rejected without this experiment.
The previous controversy around the researchers is not about them scamming patients, it's about them publishing only the positive results of their work and not disclosing negative results, making the average success rate appear better. This is one reason they publish full event streams and list days with no attempts and failed attempts extensively in this paper. The code has also been published, and the raw potential recordings are available on request. I had a careful read and I can't find anything methodologically problematic in this publication. When you watch the video, be aware this is the longest and most successful session, and the researchers made this very clear.
The first doesn't infer the second. It infers the opposite: They are eliminating unintelligible results.
One controversial incident? This is an extremely common type of scam. There's always somebody claiming they can speak to your comatose or deceased loved one, and they're always scamming you. No, the coma communicators aren't more reliable than the ghost communicators. No, there is no reason you would ever expect someone in this field to be telling the truth, particularly not when they've been caught running the same scam in the past.
> the patient, who was unable to move any muscles or even open his eyes
That's a common scam? Where is that documented?
Even if it is, this report has evidence to the contrary.
Was that also discredited? Is there any standing evidence of communication by the locked-in?
the user has a screen in front of them where the alphabet is cycled through at about 0.5 ch/s. scalp electrodes detect a signal associated with novelty or surprise allowing the user to spell out communications, very slowly.
edit: the cycling is in random order, thus exploiting the p300 surprise signal when the right character is highlighted. there's also some manipulation of spatial location to enhance the evocation of the signal.