Today I Learned

Researchers created a new brain–computer interface (BCI) capable of decoding attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translating it to text in real time, using a recurrent neural network decoding approach. One participant in their study, who was paralysed from the neck down, was able to reach a writing speed of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% accuracy when using the new handwriting BCI. Credit: High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting Francis R. Willett, Donald T. Avansino, Leigh R. Hochberg, Jaimie M. Henderson & Krishna V. Shenoy Nature 593, 249–254 (2021), DOI: