Erick Ramsey was injured in a car accident in 1999, resulting in a blood clot in his brain's stem cell that caused a stroke where his body and his mind met. The diagnosis is a rare condition known as Locked-in syndrome, which means he has no control over any of his muscles. He will never move or speak but has been spared his conscious and unconscious processing systems, such as his memory, his reason and his emotions. He can feel, see and hear but will not have any way of communicating.
Dr. Phillip Kennedy of Neural Signals Inc. , a pioneer of brain computer interface research works with Erick to introduce medical innovation and the human mind to produce communication, not verbally but audibly.
In his office he hooks Eric up with wires connected to the back of his head and asks Eric to mentally think about making the sound of a word that is spelled with various variations containing a vowel that are projected on a wall before him. As Erick does, a booming vibration pours out of a speaker, the sound is coming from Erick's brain. Erick is the first human to have his thoughts translated directly into speech.
Dr. Kennendy performed an MRI on Erick showing him visuals of animals and monitoring what areas of the brain were stimulated when he tried to sound out the name of the animals. The premotor cortex that controls movement of the mouth was the central focus of his effort prompting Kennedys neral teal to thread three hair thin teflon coated gold wires into that exact part of his brain.
What happened next was a progression of sound units which enabled Kennedy and Frank Guenther, a neuroscientist, to develop a prosethetic voice decoder that allows Erick's thoughts to be audible.
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