working on

I am working on a presentation of an article entitled 'Cognitive Control Signals for Neural Prosthetics' (Science, vol. 305, 9 July 2004) for a course I am following (FCS 1, Fonctions exécutives) within the Cognitive Science Master in Paris. It's not at all my field of expertise and so I have to do a lot of additional reading to understand the topics discussed. I found a useful related material, more in a style of popularization (Science, 24 January 2003, p. 496), and, after reading it, I understand a bit of the underpinnings, though not the experimental protocols and all the neural details. It's hard to decode this kind of stuff when you previously did philosophy, you know... I hope Martin, my co-presenter, is more adept at these aspects. However, I have a certain motivation to go through, because I have been keeping for a while in my mind some ideas regarding (i) a possible BCI (brain-computer interface) that could decipher the words and sentences you construct when typing on a keyboard and that could use the neural signals to control an external device that could, quasi-automatically, do the ingrate job of typing, and (ii) a gadget that could translate from a language to another by identifying the constructions in the source-language in the brain (something like the universal translators in Star Trek) .