CHICAGO:- Researchers at Northwestern University (NU) Medicine and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences have moved closer to creating speech brain machine interfaces by unlocking new information about how the brain encodes speech. To do this, NU researchers recorded brain signals from the cortical surface using electrodes placed in patients undergoing brain surgery to remove brain tumors. The patients had to be awake during their surgery, so researchers asked them to read words from a screen. After the surgery, the researchers marked the times when the patients produced phonemes and gestures.