A team of scientists from Stanford are planning to sit Stephen Hawking down in a room, place a device on his head, and literally hack his brain to figure out what is going on there inside it.

The scientists have developed a tool called iBrain and they will do this at a conference in Cambridge, UK, next month. Philip Low, a professor at Stanford and inventor of the iBrain, explains to the Telegraph:

“This is very exciting for us because it allows us to have a window into the brain. We’re building technology that will allow humanity to have access to the human brain for the first time… We’d like to find a way to bypass [Stephen’s] body, pretty much hack his brain.”.

Stephen Hawing is suffering from a motor neurone disease and had lost his power of speech nearly 30 years ago. The scientists are planning to use their technology to recognize his high-level brain activity (which is supposed to be higher than most of us) in order to understand it and convert it into speech and movement.

While such technology has been in development for a long time, it’s worked with mixed results. For it to be at a stage where Stephen Hawking is willing to sit on a stage to demonstrate its abilities—well, that could signal that something quite special is about to happen.

Source: gizmodo.com

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