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Artificial Vision for the Blind
castanaveras writes "Canadian doctors implanted an artificial eye into a blind man - it performs well enough for him to be able to drive (admittedly in an empty parking lot)." We've done lots of previous stories about bionic eyes.
Now that they can replace your glass eye with one that actually lets you see, I guess my novelty glass eyes won't do so well... It would have been nice to see them go into production, the magic 8 ball eye, the screen saver eye, and the flashing 12:00 eye... I wonder how long it will be before someone works out how to advirtise directly to your brain by hacking your eyes... gives whole new meaning to feed my eyes doesn't it.
flinging poop since 1969
They weren't Canadian doctors. They were doctors from the university of St. Louis doing the procedure on a Canadian man.
I stole this Sig
In order to go to sleep, does the man needs to turn his artificial eye "off"?
So if creativity was your only limitation, what would the ultimate artificial eyeball be capable of?
I assume it would have huge amounts of optical zoom capability. Would it also have some sort of CCD showing so that you could change your eye "style" on demand?
Maybe it could have a little hole in the middle of it setup to squirt "eye fluid" on people you don't like!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Oh this is not really a big deal. Star Trek showed us years ago that you could make a blinde man see just by putting a hair-clip over the front of his face.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
...this is actually nothing particularly special, since all the technologies are relatively well-known (among the right circles), and mostly invented by Dr. Steve Mann of the University of Toronto. According to Steve, what the patient actually perceives is more akin to contrast resolution, rather than anything that the visually unimpaired would call "sight".
What is perhaps more interesting, and more widely useful is the Eyetap technology itself. Essentially, Eyetap uses the camera and wearble computer to drive a small laser that mediates reality directly into the eye. For people who are not blind, but profoundly visually impaired, this technology may be a godsend.
Beam me up, Geordi LaForge!
When I was yonger I used to wonder whether I had the choice of losing sight or hearing which would I chose. Sight is so important to us. Yet to lose hearing would be to sacrifice music, which is my main pursuit outside of work. Also, it would be less of a step down for me to lose sight than for many people. I was born with a deformed left eye. A strip down the middle of the retina is missing, and there's a separate, more complicated problem I've never bothered to learn about as well. I used to wear plastic-, then glass-eyes to mask it. The plastic ones were made oversized and have stretched the skin around the socket, and it became painful, but that just gave me the excuse I needed to give up wearing them altogethre. I feel proud to have a problem that isn't and not cover it up, and rarely think about it, and have friends and family completely forget about it.
It's better to be born that way than to lose an eye for several reasons. Obviously, the pain and anguish of losing an eye. Also the need for people in that situation to redevelop their coordination. The only disadvantage is that if you don't develop parts of your sight while you are young - like me, you don't develop it at all. There will be a limit to which the brains of people given sight mid-life will be able to use them. Stereoscopic vision will be right out (even people with squints that come good can have problems with this, like my father), and they will never develop the coordination that somebody with childhood experience can.
Still, developments like those in this story give you a warm feeling about the positive power of our scientific endeavours, and the benefits of progress.
My former rowing coach is a dentist. Somehow years ago we got to talking about his work, and gross medical professions. Consensus among the squad was that optic surgerey was the right up there with the most squeemish of them, and he commented that in a way he wished he'd put his energy into that field rather than his own. When we asked why he responded that for the same amount of work you get to fix people's sight, and that that's one of the finest gifts you can give somebody.
:)
Believe with me, my saplings.
There's been a long-recognized phenomenon discovered among people who have sight restored after long periods of blindness: Motivation Crisis
http://psych.wisc.edu/vision/courses/recovery.htm
http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:ZD8gWmH2aEYC
Notes on this phenomenon go back to at least 1771, with the publishing of the book "L'Aveugle Qui Refiise deVoir." By 1932, there was a book "Space and Sight" that concluded that "every newly sighted adult sooner or later comes to a 'motivation crisis', and that not every patient gets through it." Fortunately for this guy though, this problem seems to be more linked to people who lost their sight early, and then regained it much later, having to radically change their lives down to the tiniest mannerisms. It might have something to do with the time limitation they are putting on him, and the scientists choice of Jans, for his positive attitude.
Definetly an interesting topic on human psychology though. Hopefully with future inventions along this line, no one will be forceably blind long enough for such depression to occur along these lines. It makes one wonder though - will more distant technology create a new sort of "Motivation Crisis" in us if perception enchancements become widely available and used.
Ryan Fenton
Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed by this device, and I hope it works out.
However, the visual cortex is not the end all-all be-all of visual information in the brain. Visual information on the way to this cortex is first passed through other areas of the brain, such as the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, which process the information, and also allow it to interact with other brain areas.
Based on my knowledge of the intricate, piecemeal nature of brain design, these pre-processing areas are probably involved in some fairly important low-level, reflexive aspects of vision. Bypassing them may restore the conscious aspects of vision and allow a great deal of function, but will miss out on some other aspects of vision that we are not consciously aware of.
Repairing the optic nerve is the only way to get real vision.
But that's step #1000, kudos to these pioneers for having the courage and ability to do step #10.
Mother: "Junior, what were you doing at your girlfriend's house last night??"
(18-year old) Junior: "Um... nothing mom!!! *turns red, obviously hiding something*"
Mother: "Junior, plug in your eye now, let me see!!"
--pi
Actually, AMD stock rose $1.50 on the news that they would provide cheap, onboard processors for visual implants.
Patients' complaints about the heat will be drowned out by the scream of cooling fans.
It all goes downhill from first post
if the batteries died in it, you would be third eye blind ;)
"The true victory will come when when we manage to reattach nerve connections completely, because then we can repair spinal cord injuries and the like. "
Agreed. However, there are some hopeful alternatives. The brain has some very powerful processing capabilities. I don't remember where I read it, but recently I ran across a story where they were sending signals to the part of the brain that processes sound. Using sound, the patient was able to create a crude image of basic solid shapes. This isn't sight, but this person was able to recognize the dresser in her bedroom.
I can imagine that they'll find inventive ways to send some sort of signal to the brain, and it'll make use of the information it's getting. Heck, we may see a VISOR like Geordi LaForge weas. Imagine sight via RF signals...
"Derp de derp."