Blind Soldier Uses Tongue To "See"

Zen found this story about a blind soldier using a lollypop-sized tongue sensor to 'see.' The system actually enables him to walk and read unaided. The guy says, "It feels like licking a nine-volt battery or like popping candy. The camera sends signals down onto the lollypop and onto your tongue, you can then determine what they mean and transfer it to shapes."

Comments

Re:Brain Port

[PPalmgren]

We also covered this last year

The Brain that Changes Itself

[pschulam]

Check out the book "The Brain that Changes Itself" if you're interested in this sort of thing.

This was done a few years ago

[vivin]

Back then it was just an experiment. Cool to see it being used in practice. Here is the link that goes to ABC news:

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2401551&page=1

Also, technically he's not a "soldier". He's a "marine". Us Army guys are "soliders" :)

Re:Sweet! Another example of the human mind!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Yet another example of the adaptability of the human brain.

More than some might realize.

Some decades ago (when a camera was not practically portable) a similar device was built with an array of vibrators on the back for the interface. This worked as well (though the resolution was necessarily low both because of the size of the vibrators and because the back has a low density of touch sensors).

But one event was telling:

At one point the camera tipped over into the scene it was viewing. The subject reflexively threw his hands up to "protect his eyes". (Later the blind-from-birth subject said he now had a referent for the word "looming".)

This event implies that the subject's brain had routed the input from the touch sensors on his back into his visual processing at a stage before the "dangerously close incoming object" detection. So he was "really seeing" without eyes.