Blind Get Wired - for Sight

Graz writes "MSNBC has an article about a blind guy that can navigate around obstacles using camera input into his brain." It's not much, but it's way better than nothing. Looks a little bit painful, though. Update: See this ABC story with a slightly different take on the same subject.

Bill Gates of Borg has *nothing* on this.

Allow me to spend a moment considering what this kind of technology and experimentation represents.

150, perhaps even one hundred years ago, the completely blind, and even visually impaired (hi!) were considered next to useless by "normal" society. Disabled in general were embarassments to be hidden, rather than fellows to be assisted and given a chance to grow. A century or two ago, I probably would have been sent to a "special" school, if my family were rich and looking to dump me. If my parents were poor, forget it. No way to make up for crap eyes, or deformed legs, or a fried brain.

Fast-forward to 2000. Legs don't work? Get prosthetics! Muscles don't respond properly? Treatment, baby! Eyes not up to snuff? Get a brain implant! This is a glorious time, at least if you live in a region with access to medical help. Whereas someone like me or worse would be stuck in some "good with his hands" job long ago, now I can participate in a radio/TV arts program. So can the completely blind guy one year ahead of me. Advances like these may allow him, me, and other blind/visually screwed people to one day experience sight approaching that of a person blessed with a working pair of optic receptors. Perhaps bulky visors, headsets, even glasses will be unnecessary.

If there was a project in progress to fix my &lt 20/200, color-blind, light-sensitive eyes, or at least get around the problem, I'd sign up in a second. I wouldn't wish this state on my worst enemy. However, I've become used to it. I still express disbelief at the ranges most people can discern text, when I'm still trying to figure out just what in hell they're looking at.

We can always expect the worst, hope for the best, and work toward a better future in any way we can. Otherwise, why the fsck are we here?

(actually...leave that question for another thread.)

what /.'ers want to know is, does it run linux, and can you make a beowulf cluster out of it?
plat

Re:Interesting Question

I suppose, that someone might figure out exactly where the "phonological loop" of short-term memory is (that's the part you're using when you hear your own voice in your head), decode the representations of all known phonemes, and start injecting thoughts in via electrodes.

How much do they really know about the phonological loop? How diffrent is the voice in the back of my head from the voice that is about to come out?

I don't really think that adding other sences would be that importent as compaired to just have a really ergonomic computer interface at the other ends of the ones we have now. I am a first year graduate student in mathematics and the most useful thing I can think of is having the ability to quickly write symboles to my field of vision and move them about without having to say stuff or move my arms. If the process of thinking about moving an arm or saing something really dose triger activity like the actual movement then maybe we could interact with a computer via these abortive movements. This would be the killer app. for brain implants since people could use images and audio in everyday communication.

There are also problems in math which would be easyer to solve if you could develope an intuition about higher dimentional spaces. Idea: the phase space of the ``possitions of the human body'' is MCUH larger then 3 dimentional. It might be possible to take a mussle group and program a computer to respond to the movements of those mussles as if they were moving an object in a higher dimentional space, then the user might gain some intuition about things which they could apply to solving some open problem. It's kinda funny to think we may have applications of biology to mathematics someday.. :)

Jeff

Interesting Question

Makes you wonder if, as a baby, you had some strange thing (IR port, GPS, radio) wired into your brain just after birth, would you learn how to use it, just as you learn how to stand up, talk, and focus your eyes? The possibilities for this sort of thing would be very interesting if the problems could be worked out.

Anyone want to donate their kid to research? If he survives, he'll be able to do 23-digit factoring in his head... specifically in the math coprocessor under his skin.

This should work without brain implants

What I don't understand is this:
Blind people are able to read Braille which, I understand, is comparable to a punchcard character code. Little bumps on a surface stand for the characters of the alphabet. To a non-visually impaired person like me, it is a miracle of skill and training to read characters where all I feel is a surface with bumps. This shows what the brain can do given enough training (and will.)
So I think: Why should the brain implant be necessary? Why couldn't you deliver the "visual" information using a device close to a Braille converter? I imagine a little device that you can strap onto the back of your hand or wherever the skin has enough nervous endings to discriminate separate tactile impulses. The device would have little bumps ordered in a 10x10 array, raising and lowering them by electromagnetic switches, much like a Braille converter. So the blind person could have the visual input from the computer, translated into a tactile image that is delivered to the back of his hand, and he could feel the raw image like he is able to feel Braille writing.
No brain implant would be needed, and it would make the device much cheaper and more usable for general purposes.

Re:Interesting Question

Basically, what you were saying was "The brain has never been able to use anymore then 5 senses." That's true, but until we hook more stuff up to it, we'll never know.

Right, but that's like saying "My PC which has no expansion slots has never been able to use anything more than the default hardware, but until I crack the case and start soldering stuff onto the traces on the motherboard, I'll never know." It's not that simple. For one thing, where would you plug in new inputs? I'm in neuroscience (admittedly only at the beginning grad level), and I can't think of a place.

There's also the possibility of ether "growing" new lobes for new things or "emulating" the lobes in hardware. Or we could just plug new senses into the visual cortex or something (would it be another type of sight then?)

Well, first off, you can't really say that a given function exists in a given lobe, because they're shipping signals all over the place. Secondly, even if you grow a new set of tissue to plug your new port into, you still need to teach the brain to integrate that signal, and that's a process which is not really understood at all. To some degree, we'd have to solve the problem of where consciousness is.

Your comment about plugging in new things to the visual pathway (or another sense pathway) makes the most sense, and I think that this is how most "new senses" will end up. If we could actually get massive arrays of microelectrodes (and the software to configure and drive them), then it'd be possible to overlay stuff on the retinotopic maps in realtime, just like CBS does to their video feed. (Yes, we will cover your significant other's body with ads for our new porno site. Ain't technology wonderful?)

Anyway, the human brain can do *a lot* more then is evolutionarily needed. I'm sure that it could be augmented somewhat by technology.

It depends on how one parses your statement. Yes, the brain can think of a whole lot of stuff. On the other hand, there's evidence that suggests that it basically handles all that stuff using a few limited pathways. It all mostly comes down to efficient pattern-matching anyway. However, that does not imply that the brain has a lot of extra circuitry lying around which one can just co-opt at will. Evolution is not kind to superfluous stuff.

Alik

Re:1978?

I just looked back and realized that they said he had this implanted in 1978 -- Does that seem like an awful long time ago (for this sort of thing) to anyone else?

Not really. Ever since we realized the brain was electric, people have been stimulating it like mad and seeing what they can put in and take out. The fact that it's taken us this long to get this far should tell you something about how hard a problem it is. (Consider how much trouble we still have with the problem of computer vision. It's getting better, but it's nowhere near a solved problem, IMHO.)

If they could do a 10x10 pixel image back then, what are they capable of now?

Well, speaking as someone who's sort of part of they... a 10x10 pixel image. That's why this is news --- after two decades of trying, computer tech has finally gotten to the point where we can give Jerry useful input. However, the science of brain electrodes hasn't advanced that much. They're more durable now and often thinner, but in practice, we still probably wouldn't be able to sink nearly enough into Jerry's visual cortex to convey a complete visual image. (On the other hand, there is the example of the cat. However, that cat was never expected to have long-term survival.) We may be jacking in within our lifetimes, but it's not going to be as soon as you hope.

Alik Widge
MD/PhD Program
University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon