A Shrug Is Not a Word
The anchor verses are Mark 7:34 · 1 Samuel 1:13 (NIV).
Yesterday the National Institutes of Health reported that researchers at the University of California, San Francisco had enabled two people with paralysis to communicate through a digital avatar using speech signals and gestures together.
Words and movement, in the same exchange.
The work comes from Edward Chang’s laboratory, with Samantha Brosler among the lead authors. It was published in Nature Neuroscience on September 14. Sensors on the brain’s surface record activity that computer models translate into commands for the avatar. This requires an implanted device. It does not restore movement to the person’s limbs.
Three people took part in the broader study. Two used the avatar in the conversation experiments. One recorded a median accuracy of one hundred percent for each decoder across three short conversation blocks. Those blocks included speech alone, gestures alone, and paired attempts. That result is not a measure of unrestricted everyday conversation.
The achievement was bringing forms of expression together that earlier systems had mostly handled separately.
A wave. A thumbs-up. Something a sentence alone does not carry.
Consider a shrug.
A shrug is not a word. It can mean I do not know, or who can say. The movement brings its own meaning to the conversation. Restoring words alone can leave other ways of expressing ourselves out of reach.
Chang put it plainly: “Conversation is about much more than the words being spoken.”
One more detail carries. For one participant, the researchers used ten gestures and ten phrases, creating a hundred possible pairings. The other used a smaller set.
A hundred combinations. A beginning, with clear limits.
The study used a wired connection to external equipment. NIH reported that a fully implantable wireless version would be tested next. This remains early research.
The participants’ lives belong to them. Their paralysis is not a metaphor, and nothing here claims that GOD arranged it to produce a research result.
There is a scene in Mark that gets read past, because the miracle at the end pulls attention off everything before it.
A man who is deaf and has difficulty speaking is brought to JESUS. HE takes the man aside, away from the crowd. HE touches the man’s ears and tongue, then looks toward heaven. Mark records a “deep sigh” before the command to open.
The order matters. Before the healing is announced, Mark shows us attention, touch, and a sigh. He does not tell us exactly what the man understood through those movements. He does show us JESUS attending to this particular person.
Then one word. “Ephphatha!” Mark translates it: “Be opened!” (Mark 7:34, NIV).
We may hear compassion in that sigh. Mark does not explain its precise meaning, and we should leave that distinction clear. The sigh is part of the encounter he chose to preserve.
Hannah brings another scene of being heard and being misunderstood. She is in deep distress at Shiloh. The NIV says she was “praying in her heart” (1 Samuel 1:13). Eli sees her lips moving without hearing her voice and assumes she has been drinking.
The priest mistakes her distress for drunkenness. When she explains, he responds with a blessing. He had judged before he understood.
GOD has never made that mistake.
GOD reads what has no words in it. The groan that does not resolve into a sentence. The pause on the other end of a phone call. The shrug of somebody who has been asked how they are doing and has run out of ways to answer honestly. Every one of those reaches HIM intact, without translation, without a decoder, without anybody having to produce the right vocabulary first.
Nothing in a person has to be converted into spoken language before GOD can receive it.
Somebody reading this cannot say it.
Perhaps there is no sentence that holds it. You have tried to explain it to a spouse, or a friend, or a counselor, and what comes out is smaller and flatter than the thing itself. Afterward you feel less understood than before you spoke.
That is not a failure of faith or effort. Sometimes the words we have do not carry everything we mean.
HE is not waiting on your vocabulary.
The study does not remove the barriers people with paralysis face. Access, reliability, and everyday use still need work. We can welcome this research and keep listening to the people whose lives it might affect.
What holds here is the attention before the command, and Hannah’s prayer before anyone in the room understood it. We can bring GOD what we cannot yet explain.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
🙏 To the three research participants who gave their time and effort to work whose outcome was uncertain.
🙏 To the one who has been misread by someone entrusted with their care.
🙏 To the researcher who reports a promising result honestly, including its limits.
🙏 To the one who has something with no sentence in it, and has stopped trying to explain it to anybody.
Grace and Peace.
Sources: NIH research announcement · Brosler and colleagues, Nature Neuroscience · Mark 7 · 1 Samuel 1. Scripture quotations: New International Version (NIV).