Our voices have superpowers. From a coach firing up a soccer team before a big game to a mother soothing a cranky baby in the middle of the night, the human voice is key to expressing feelings and forging connections. The tone of a person’s voice might even communicate feelings to loved ones better than facial expressions. So what happens to a person when their voice disappears?
People who have lost the ability to speak due to neurodegenerative disease or brain injury are talking again thanks to groundbreaking technologies that can decode the instructions the brain sends to speech muscles. For this issue’s cover story, senior neuroscience writer Laura Sanders interviewed Casey Harrell, a man who regained his voice — lost to ALS — through a brain-computer interface.
You can listen to Harrell in his own words in Season Two of The Deep End, our award-winning podcast. Harrell told Sanders: “It was so amazing to be able to be understood right from the get-go and to be able to talk and respond to my daughter, especially because that was lacking completely from my life.”
In the podcast, Sanders digs into other innovations, including AI voice cloning, as well as the sinister potential of such technology to hijack people’s voices. “It might be used in a way people don’t want to have happen,” she says. Hear more wherever you get your podcasts.
In this issue, we also report on the progress in developing an effective treatment for stiff person syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that makes the body’s muscles freeze without warning. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration hasn’t yet approved any treatments for the disorder, which occurs in roughly 2 in 100,000 people. But that could some day change. Researchers are testing new CAR T cell therapies, senior writer Meghan Rosen reports. The process involves modifying a patient’s white blood cells so they wipe out harmful immune cells. Scientists hope a single treatment could cure the disease.
And there’s more controversy about using AI in mathematics, senior physics writer Emily Conover reports. OpenAI made waves when the company announced that it had solved one of the most famous puzzles in math — a day after mathematicians reported advances on a similar problem. The development is among a flood of AI-fueled achievements this year and raises big questions about who gets credit when the algorithms are doing the work.