India, May 17 -- Caltech neuroscientists are making promising progress toward showing that a device known as a brain-machine interface (BMI), which they developed to implant into the brains of patients who have lost the ability to speak, could one day help all such patients communicate by simply thinking and not speaking or miming.

In 2022, the team reported that their BMI had been successfully implanted and used by a patient to communicate unspoken words. Now, reporting in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the scientists have shown that the BMI worked successfully in a second human patient.

"We are very enthusiastic about these new findings," says Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and director and leade...