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Today, people who can't speak or write because of paralysis have very limited ways of communicating, e.g. using a pointer to touch words or letters on a screen or having computers track their eye movements. In a medical first, researchers harnessed the brain waves of a paralyzed man unable to speak - and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen. Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, led the work in developing a "speech neuroprosthetic" -- decoding brain waves that normally control the vocal tract, the tiny muscle movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and larynx that form each consonant and vowel.