Brain Implants That Help Paralyzed People Speak Just Broke New Records | What’s the Best Sign of Success, Emotional Intelligence or IQ? Turns Out, It’s Something Else | What Are Dreams For? | How superstars and heritage acts hijacked the vinyl revival

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Brain Implants That Help Paralyzed People Speak Just Broke New Records - WIRED    Paralysis had robbed the two women of their ability to speak. For one, the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease that affects the motor neurons. The other had suffered a stroke in her brain stem. Though they can’t enunciate clearly, they remember how to formulate words. Now, after volunteering to receive brain implants, both are able to communicate through a computer at a speed approaching the tempo of normal conversation. By parsing the neural activity associated with the facial movements involved in talking, the devices decode their intended speech at a rate of 62 and 78 words per minute, respectively—several times faster than the previous record. Their cases are detailed in two papers published Wednesday by separate teams in the journal Nature. While slower than the roughly 160-word-per-minute rate of natural conversation among English speakers, scientists say it’s an exciting step toward restoring real-time speech using a brain-computer interface, or BCI. “It is getting close to being used in everyday life,” says Marc Slutzky, a neurologist at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved in the new studies. Continued here What's the Best Sign of Success, Emotional Intelligence or IQ? Turns Out, It's Something Else - Inc.com    The Application for Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 Is Now Live! Here's How to Craft a Winning Pitch Want More Engaged Employees? Let Them Meditate on the Job With Deepak Chopra, This Startup Says There has been a long-standing debate about what is a better predictor of job and career success -- IQ or EQ. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium What Are Dreams For? - The New Yorker    In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams. Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day—researchers using ultrasound can see their eyes flitting to and fro—and their whole bodies seem to twitch. When a mother feels her baby kick, it may be because the baby is in REM sleep. Once born, babies continue to spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight. Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd. In adults, dreams are offshoots of waking life: we have experiences, then we dream about them. But a baby in the womb hasn’t had any experiences. Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about? According to the dominant theory, the rats’ twitching eyes were supposedly looking around at dream scenery. But the rat pups were just days old; their eyelids were still sealed shut, and they’d never seen anything. So why were their eyes—and their whiskers, limbs, and tails—twitching hundreds of thousands of times each day? Continued here How superstars and heritage acts hijacked the vinyl revival - The Economist    WHEN THE Rolling Stones released their debut, self-titled album in 1964, fans rushed out to shops to buy the LP. When the rockers put out “Hackney Diamonds” on October 20th, their first album of original material since 2005, some acolytes chose convenience and streamed it. But many also will buy the record on vinyl, just as admirers did almost 60 years ago. It will be available in standard black, as well as blue and green. In America people can also get it adorned, for some reason, with the logo of a Major League Baseball team. The idea, no doubt, is that vinyl is a heritage format befitting a heritage act. But the ongoing vinyl revival, now well into its second decade, crosses generations, genders and genres. In America, 25- to 34-year-olds buy as much vinyl as the over-55s. Rock has long been dominant, but other genres are making noise, too. Last year Taylor Swift, pop’s reigning queen, sold almost 1m copies of “Midnights” on vinyl. In August Travis Scott’s “Utopia” moved more vinyl copies in a single week than any rap album since data collection began in 1991. Continued here

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