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The Blind Shall See Again, But When?
An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade."
Flip that argument - who's up for preventing blacks from purchasing skin lightening or radical plastic surgery?
See, kids, that's called a false dichotomy.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Can we not use bit.ly and other URL shorteners on /.? There's no need to. They're harmful, actually. Thanks!
1. This is the best cure we have so far
2. They are deficient, they lack the ability to hear. Hate to hurt their feelings, but that is the truth. I am deficient in sight, so I use contacts.
3. Not if they want to communicate with 99.9% of the world that uses sound to communicate instead of gestures.
I work in Visual Prosthetics.
Here's the thing with any sort of augmented vision: there's no way you can justify the risks of implantation when a fully external device that shows whatever mapped, morphed, or manipulated version of vision will work as well or better.
If you have normal sight, or even nearly normal sight, then why have an implant that carries significant risk, will be large and potentially painful for some time to come, will require frequent recharging, will be expensive as getout, when you can put on a special pair of glasses with a heads-up-display that does more? Telescopic vision, IR, UV, macroscopic, x-ray, edge enhanced, color shifted, depth enhanced, whatever you can think of, it is easier to do it with a head-worn high-tech display that you can take off at will.
In contrast, having an implant means -- for any kind of implant that is under current consideration -- fixed resolution, and, unless you're willing to undergo significant, expensive surgeries, many of the interface parameters will be technologically fixed. Yes, there's a lot you can do with reprogramming, but it's essentially impossible to change the stimulating electrodes and their drivers.
Trust me, you do not want a visual prosthesis unless you need one. The normal visual system, enhanced with purely external devices, will always be better.
Any visual implant that is currently under discussion
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Well, just dumping the extended color data onto the brain might not be enough. When a child learns to see, its brain already has the basic visual perception algorithms hard-coded, e.g. there are brain structure for color detection, edge detection, motion detection etc. Those structures are built from the DNA, the genetic material, so the brain does not start learning from scratch.
Only those structures allow a child to pick up seeing as fast as it does (the process of learning to see in humans is necessary because of our ability for 3D vision. Depth perception depends on the distance between your left and your right eye; the hard-coded perception algorithms don't know this distance beforehand, so people have to learn seeing after being born. Animals without 3D vision are far more quickly able to see).
Anyway, there are no brain structures for the extended color data, so how would a brain learn the new input?