Rewiring the senses - seeing with the tongue (cure for the blind)

[keikiwai]

It's pretty hard to surprise me when it comes to discoveries in science, but this one really got me.

Basically, take a video camera and connect the output to your tongue... that's it (well, not really, but it's the basic idea). It lets blind people see, and even people who can see can close their eyes and try it. I about it on the World's Technology Podcast.

Some links:

The Dec 2006 podcast I heard (it's at the end of the show)

http://www.theworld.org/pod/tech/podcast130.mp3

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/stor...551&page=1

http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0



[/ QUOTE ]

If / when this gets off the ground on a large scale, this will change lives in a big way.

Stuff of science fiction.

Not sure if this is enough for a thread, as it's basically just an info blurb, but I found it really interesting and it obv. has big potential impacts.

[eviljeff]

if you saw someone with one of these things, how long would you follow them around?

[lippy]

That YouTube video sums this up pretty well. I really wonder what the progression of this technology would mean for blind people. And, you're right, this looks right out of Star Trek.

[guids]

If you guys have a chance, there is a modern marvels on teh history channel that has this device on it, with a bunch of other really cool electronic-for-humans type stuff. A computer that can be controlled by thinking, growing single organs out of a petri dish etc.

[GTL]

[ QUOTE ]
If you guys have a chance, there is a modern marvels on teh history channel that has this device on it, with a bunch of other really cool electronic-for-humans type stuff. A computer that can be controlled by thinking, growing single organs out of a petri dish etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

yeah, i've read and seen a bunch of stuff about controlling computers by thinking. this is another technology that i think will be insanely cool once it takes off and gets very finely tuned. everything i've seen is just being able to play pong by thinking left or right. it will be nuts when we can surf the web and type a paper just by thinking of what we want the computer to do.

[BillytheKidd]

I really look forward to typing via thought, I would finally be able to write those books I've been working on in my mind for the last 10 years.

[bucktotal]

ya very cool, but it is truly the computational power associated with the technology that is impressive, rather than our understanding of brain function.

and while we may one be able to move a cursor around a screen (essentially 3 degrees of freedom vertical/horizontal/click-doubleclick) using thoughts, we are soooooooo far from being able to detect specific language constructs, especially from a surface electrode (as opposed to implanted wires in the brain), that this whole thought typing is just not going to happen in our lifetime... sorry.

[keikiwai]

[ QUOTE ]
ya very cool, but it is truly the computational power associated with the technology that is impressive, rather than our understanding of brain function.

and while we may one be able to move a cursor around a screen (essentially 3 degrees of freedom vertical/horizontal/click-doubleclick) using thoughts, we are soooooooo far from being able to detect specific language constructs, especially from a surface electrode (as opposed to implanted wires in the brain), that this whole thought typing is just not going to happen in our lifetime... sorry.

[/ QUOTE ]

technology is impressive though for "reading" the brain

pet scans can do very impressive things, for example they can tell whether you are thinking of a place or a face.... this is an unusual example, since the place and face "locations" of the brain are unusually centralized and happen to be different

but, basically i heard an interview (on Fresh Air.. March 13 Jeffrey Rosen on "Neurolaw" in the courtroom) w/ a neuroscientist, Jeffrey Rosen, who got a pet scan, and he was told to think of either places or faces in succession for a few minutes, and not tell the testers which ones he was thinking of

after the test, the people conducting the pet scan were able to look at the pet scan (which essentially was measuring glucose uptake in the brain, so where it was active) and the were able to tell him "place, place, face, place, face, etc."

that it very impressive

in fact stuff like that has pretty big implications for things like lie detection.... neurolaw is a new and evolving application of things like this

minority report anyone? j/k - but interesting stuff

[bucktotal]

[ QUOTE ]

technology is impressive though for "reading" the brain

pet scans can do very impressive things, for example they can tell whether you are thinking of a place or a face.... this is an unusual example, since the place and face "locations" of the brain are unusually centralized and happen to be different


[/ QUOTE ]

well, thats the thing. is the PET scan really 'reading the brain'? i'm not so sure i like that analogy.

Places (or moving around in space) requires the hippocampus which is in the inferior-medial of the brain, whereas processing of faces occurs in the posterior-inferior-lateral part of the brain.

the fact that a PET scan can determine whether we are thinking of a place or a face is only because either the hippocampus or post-inf-lat. regions are "lighting up", respectively. In this setting, we could also decipher whether the subject was thinking of music, swinging a tennis racket, etc... because these actions occur in disparate regions as well.

so really, its just signal detection and nothing complex in terms of our understanding of how these thoughts are being generated.

now, the spatial memory that you brought up is rather interesting, because if we record from say, 1000 neurons in the hippocampus (space place), we can use the patterns of activity generated by those cells to predict where the subject is in a familiar place. that is, the pattern of activity in the hippocampus (called the 'place code') is essentially better at predicting the spatial location of the subject than a video camera is.

this i find quite remarkable and is more in line with a truly impressive scientific result.