Scientists at Meta have used artificial intelligence (AI) and noninvasive brain scans to unravel how thoughts are translated into typed sentences, two new studies show.

In one study, scientists developed an AI model that decoded brain signals to reproduce sentences typed by volunteers. In the second study, the same researchers used AI to map how the brain actually produces language, turning thoughts into typed sentences.

The findings could one day support a noninvasive brain-computer interface that could help people with brain lesions or injuries to communicate, the scientists said.

“This was a real step in decoding, especially with noninvasive decoding,” Alexander Huth, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Brain-computer interfaces that use similar decoding techniques have been implanted in the brains of people who have lost the ability to communicate, but the new studies could support a potential path to wearable devices.

In the first study, the researchers used a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures the magnetic field created by electrical impulses in the brain, to track neural activity while participants typed sentences. Then, they trained an AI language model to decode the brain signals and reproduce the sentences from the MEG data.