Scientists Reverse Engineer Animal Brains To Create Bionic Prosthetic Eyes 96
MrSeb writes "Utilizing neuroscience, gene therapy, and optogenetics, a pair of researchers from Cornell University have created a bionic prosthetic eye that can restore almost-normal vision to animals blinded by destroyed retinas. Prosthetic eyes have been created before, but for the most part these have been dumb prosthetics — chips that wire themselves into the ganglion cells behind the retina, which are the interface between the retina and optic nerve. These chips receive optical stimuli (via a CMOS sensor, for example), which they transmit as electrical signals to the ganglion cells. These prosthetic eyes can produce a low-resolution grayscale field that the brain can then interpret — which is probably better than being completely blind — but they don't actually restore sight. The Cornell prosthetic eye however, developed by Sheila Nirenberg and Chethan Pandarinath, is a much closer analog to a real eye, almost completely restoring sight in mice — and within 1 or 2 years, humans (PDF)."
Ok... (Score:2, Insightful)
Now tell me how we could have simulated this and tested it in a computer model, PETA guys.
*crosses arms and taps foot*
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BMO
Having seen the talk (Score:3, Insightful)
My jaw dropped in amazement. The fact the technique is extensible to other sensory and brain malfunctions seems to be just icing on the cake.
No, you're exactly right! (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my first thought.
Okay. These researchers figured out the coding sequence for the retina/nerve interface. Basically they figured out TCP/IP for your eyes. And they designed an "honest" retina that mimics a regular retina.
I'll stop there for a moment and say WOW. Nicely done, absolutely thoroughly amazing.
But then let's up the ante and have the circuitry they are using employ infrared detection. [wikipedia.org] Not too difficult to do, we've been making these kinds of devices for many decades. And the same goes for a x50 zoom. Easy peasy.
A HUD display would be possible too. Watch the TED lecture at the bottom of the article. This lady KNOWS THE ENCODING that your eyes use! She can actually take the pulses transmitted to the brain and solve them backwards to see what you were looking at! With that kind of knowledge making something that transmits a generated image would be simple.
This is a *gigantic* breakthrough.