Yeah, less than half of sessions yielded "intelligible" output.
From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation, as was seen with Koko the gorilla and the claims that she could talk, when in fact she was just spouting gibberish that her handlers would interpret.
I anticipate more scientists are going to become disgraced as this study is scrutinized by peers.
But, hey, I hope I'm wrong. It would indeed be nice to talk to locked-in loved ones.
The full event streams have been published this time around, including the failed sessions. I recommend reading the article and watching the videos of the system operating - they have a video of the input calibration/training, and another video of the longest session. The sessions are few and many days apart, and not all of them demonstrate successful control, but on the days where the patient can successfully drive the system there is no doubt of the communication method's authenticity, and the researchers have no input or interpretation capability.
The previous controversy around the researchers is not about them scamming patients, it's about them publishing only the positive results of their work and not disclosing negative results, making the average success rate appear better. This is one reason they publish full event streams and list days with no attempts and failed attempts extensively in this paper. The code has also been published, and the raw potential recordings are available on request. I had a careful read and I can't find anything methodologically problematic in this publication. When you watch the video, be aware this is the longest and most successful session, and the researchers made this very clear.
I am also skeptic of the whole thing, but they say this:
> After 12 further days, the patient was able to reliably increase or decrease his neural activity to hit one of two “target” tones.
Isn't that evidence that this is not random noise?
The only thing that could be left to human interpretation is the "increase of activity" (I'm assuming "activity" is a signal with high dimensionality). But it is easy enough to build some metric, and demonstrate the answers are not random.
I have just enough faith in peer reviewing to hope that the paper would have been rejected without this experiment.
From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation, as was seen with Koko the gorilla and the claims that she could talk, when in fact she was just spouting gibberish that her handlers would interpret.
I anticipate more scientists are going to become disgraced as this study is scrutinized by peers.
But, hey, I hope I'm wrong. It would indeed be nice to talk to locked-in loved ones.