Easy Breezy English

​Read and answer the question🔽
Communication was still slow—it takes around a minute to select each letter. But researchers believe the device has significantly improved the man’s quality of life. He has asked for specific meals and soups, and asked to watch films with his young son, for example. One sentence translated as “I love my cool son.”

No one knows how long the electrodes will last in the man’s brain, but other studies have found that similar electrodes are still functioning five years after being implanted in other people. But for a locked-in person, “a single day can make a difference,” says Kianoush Nazarpour at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the work. “That is a fundamental opportunity for them to regain choice and control of their lives,” he says. “A day of high quality could be really important for that person.”
Nazarpour thinks that the technology could be offered to similarly locked-in individuals within the next 10 to 15 years. “For a person that has absolutely no communication, even a “yes”/”no” is potentially life-changing,” he says.

​Key vocabulary for reading:
🔴Scrap – cancel ;
🔴Approach – a way of considering or doing something;
🔴Descending – becoming lower ;
🔴Dismiss - to decide that something or someone is not important and not worth considering;

Read and answer the question🔽
The day after the electrode was implanted, the team began trying to help the man communicate. At first, the man was asked to imagine making physical movements—the idea is to get a reliable signal from the brain, and translate this into some kind of command.

But the team couldn’t get it to work. After 12 weeks of trying, they scrapped the idea and decided to try an approach called neurofeedback instead.Neurofeedback works by showing a person their brain activity in real time so that they can learn how to control it. In this case, when the electrodes in the man’s brain recorded an increase in activity, a computer would play a rising audio tone. A fall in brain activity would play a descending tone.

Within two days, he was able to increase and decrease the frequency of a sound tone,” “It was just incredible.” The man eventually learned to control his brain activity so that he could play a rising tone to signal “yes” and a descending tone to signal “no.” The man would hear the word “yellow” or “blue” for example, to choose a block of letters from which to select. He would then be played individual letters and use a rising or descending tone to either select or dismiss each.

In this way, the man was soon able to communicate entire sentences. One of the first sentences the man spelled was translated as “boys, it works so effortlessly.”

​Yesterday you watched a video about the new technology which gives people hope. Here’s an article to dig a bit deeper. It might be difficult for the beginners but it’s worth reading.

Key vocabulary for reading:
🔴Eye tracking -the process of measuring the motion of an eye;
🔴spell sth out - to say or write the letters of a word in the correct order;
🔴consent - permission for something to happen or agreement to do something

On meeting the man in February 2018, a scientist Chaudhary tried to automate the communication system that the family was already using. The team connected an eye-tracking device to computer software that would read out colors and row numbers, allowing the man to select letters one at a time using his eye movements to spell out words. But as the man increasingly lost control over his eye movements, he became less able to communicate using that device, too.

“We proposed implanting [an electrode],” says Chaudhary. Tiny electrodes can be implanted in the brain to record the electrical activity of brain cells directly. The procedure—which tends to involve drilling a hole in the skull and cutting away the brain’s protective layers—comes with a small risk of infection and damage to the brain. But there was no other choice. His wife and sister also gave their consent.