​Key vocabulary for reading: Scrap – cancel ; Approach – a | Easy Breezy English

​Key vocabulary for reading:
Scrap – cancel ;
Approach – a way of considering or doing something;
Descending – becoming lower ;
Dismiss - to decide that something or someone is not important and not worth considering;

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The day after the electrode was implanted, the team began trying to help the man communicate. At first, the man was asked to imagine making physical movements—the idea is to get a reliable signal from the brain, and translate this into some kind of command.

But the team couldn’t get it to work. After 12 weeks of trying, they scrapped the idea and decided to try an approach called neurofeedback instead.Neurofeedback works by showing a person their brain activity in real time so that they can learn how to control it. In this case, when the electrodes in the man’s brain recorded an increase in activity, a computer would play a rising audio tone. A fall in brain activity would play a descending tone.

Within two days, he was able to increase and decrease the frequency of a sound tone,” “It was just incredible.” The man eventually learned to control his brain activity so that he could play a rising tone to signal “yes” and a descending tone to signal “no.” The man would hear the word “yellow” or “blue” for example, to choose a block of letters from which to select. He would then be played individual letters and use a rising or descending tone to either select or dismiss each.

In this way, the man was soon able to communicate entire sentences. One of the first sentences the man spelled was translated as “boys, it works so effortlessly.”