imagine using technology to restore eyesight to the blind Elon musk's nuring brain implant company believes that that they can do it and to a lot of people that might sound like biblical grandstanding but there is good scientific evidence that says digital site may be a very real possibility and this is how neuralink brain implants will cure blindness the first trick is understanding what Vision even is there are certain aspects of human eyesight that are well understood but overall we really don't know how this works light as we commonly know it is essentially just electromagnetic radiation
that exists within our visible wavelengths that radiation is contained inside energetic particles called photons these photons have no Mass no electrical charge and they are in a constant state of motion hence the speed of light photons of light enter your eyeball and are focused by a lens onto a layer of tissue near the back of the eye that is your retina it's made of special cells called photo receptors and they can transform electromagnetic energy into electrical signal that signal flows through the optic nerve and into the visual cortex of the brain at which point billions
of neurons inside the brain translate the electrical signal into everything that you can see we know that the neural network processes visual information in layers there are basic low-level processing layers for things like Edge detection identifying curves recognizing objects but when we get to higher levels of processing like color encoding no one really knows what's going on in there when a person loses their ability to see it's almost always a problem associated with the eye or the optic nerve not the visual cortex so the majority of our treatment right now are focused on regenerating that
physical tissue in most scenarios that doesn't work but this also means that it's just the input device that isn't working processing system is still intact So in theory we can plug electrical signals straight into the visual cortex and create Vision in the same way as the eye and the optic nerve this does sound crazy but it has been done before actually the first experiments with stimulating VIs through electrical signals date back all the way to the late 1920s in order to understand this we need to learn a new word first photoshine this is a phenomenon
where you see light in your visual field without any light entering your eye do you ever see stars with your eyes closed do you see patterns of light when you rub your eyes these are photoshen that you are seeing photos spes can be induced by mechanical electrical or magnetic stimulation of either the retina or or the visual cortex so you'll see them if you take a blow to the head but you'll also see them if you get an electrical shock in the right portion of your brain this was first confirmed by the famous neurologist atred
Forester in 1929 decades later in 1968 two scientists at the University of Cambridge refined the procedure by connecting electrodes into the brain of a 52-year-old blind patient and wiring them to an array of radio devices when certain radio signals were transmitted into the brain the patient experienced sensations of light when just one electrode was stimulated the patient would see a single very small spot of white light in a consistent location this is the Photosphere and it was found that as long as the electrodes were spaced more than 2 mm apart the resulting photosin can be
easily distinguished from each other so by stimulating multiple electrodes at once the patient would be caused to see patterns of light this experiment was repeated in 1974 at the University of Utah they placed a rectangular grid of electrodes into the visual cortex for across by three deep and then they used these electrodes to project patterns of Braille dots into the patient's Vision creating a very primitive yet effective visual prosthetic the first of its kind now of course opening up a person's skull and sticking wires into their brain just to show them Realo letters isn't really
helping anyone but it is a solid foundation to build on we know that neuralink is working on an application called Blind sight the companies follow up to their current APP telepathy telepathy is all about output neuralink electrodes detect activity spikes from within the brain and convert those to digital signals that are transmitted wirelessly into a computer so all that the user has to do is think about moving a cursor on a screen and telepathy will make it happen now blindsight becomes about input neuralink has to use the electrodes to inject electrical signals into the brain
to stimulate the neurons and produce the photosh effect this would start with a digital camera like a GoPro strapped to a person's head or something like those rayan smart glasses these devices are already purpose-built for converting photons into electrical signal just like the retina then the neuralink device can take the place of the optic nerve transmitting the electrical signals directly into the neural networks of the visual cortex and stimulating the photos to create a visual representation of what the camera is seeing the idea is that the smaller the electrode the smaller the photos spene that
the patient will see so instead of seeing a big dot in their Vision the nurlink user might see something more like a pixel on a display using neurolinks R1 robot these electrodes can be placed into a highly accurate grid on the visual cortex just like the old experiment from the 70s but with orders of magnitude higher resolution now that's not going to instantly create any kind of photorealistic image what the neuralink user will most likely see is something like an old Atari video game it won't be particularly useful for seeing details but it might be
good enough for a person to see edges and large objects so that they don't bump into stuff more resolution in the neuralink image would require more electrodes neuralink is currently maxed out at around 1,000 but they are hoping to reach 3,000 or even 6,000 in the near term and as many as 16,000 electrode channels Within the next year or two but it's the amount of bandwidth going through the device that is the big limiting factor right now we all know what happens to a computer when it starts working too hard it gets hot and you
don't want a computer implanted in your skull to start getting hot so the efficiency of the computer chip and the performances of the battery play important roles as well also to give a person full panoramic Vision they would need to have two neuralink implants one on each hemisphere of the brain vision from your right eye is processed in the left side of the brain and vice versa to make things even stranger the image projected onto your retina by the lens in your eyeball is actually cast upside down your brain doesn't flip the image because it
doesn't receive a projected image just a series of nerve impulses that it decodes in such a way that everything is perceived correctly actually the whole process of seeing things the right way up is pretty strange if you tilt your head over 90° your perception of the world does doesn't tilt you still know up and down even when you're sideways this is the kind of stuff that still needs to get figured out and that's going to take a lot of trial and error before we even begin to get things right it won't be an easy process
don't be expecting a nurlink to replace virtual reality or augmented reality headsets anytime soon but there is potential for computer enhanced Vision to go far beyond the human eye at some point in the future and this would be long in the future but in theory we can go Way Beyond just projecting a movie into your head but we know as light is simply electromagnetic radiation that exists within our visual spectrum of wavelengths but there is light that exists in higher wavelengths than what we can see that's ultraviolet light and there is light that exists in
much longer wavelengths as well that's infrared we can't see this radiation but we know it exists and we can easily create Digital Image sensors that can read this light for us and convert it into a visible spectrum now if we go back to that idea of strapping a GoPro to a person's head and replace that with an infrared camera or an ultraviolet light detector now we've just unlocked a whole new way for a person to perceive the world we can go way beyond our conscious experience deeper into the nature of the universe and existence like
taking a high-powered psychedelic drug without any of the weird side effects anyway coming back around to real life can link restore sight to the blind yes but not in the sense of flicking a switch and turning your eyes back on but more in the sense of being able to restore a very rudimentary visual perception of the outside world like living inside your own lowres monochrome video game but as the device capability improves over time a long time resolution will improve as well as for those higher level functions would you ever see colors could you look
around in every direction you want can you tilt your head and still know which way is up well these are secrets that still need to be revealed
