“Seen” in the mind of the different letters could blind people in the experiment carried out by scientists. This could be a breakthrough in the fight against blindness. It should be noted that attempts to help those who have lost vision, are long.
And the chance, in principle, as most of them visual area of the brain remains intact and could perceive some signals. Hence the idea: to directly stimulate the visual cortex using electrode implants, so a blind person will be able to see something. Of course, not complex images, but the letters are quite likely.
the Experiment looks like. In the brain implanted electrodes, and each served as a single pixel. Together they must create the image of the letter. The electrodes were activated all at once, but the brain did not see the letter, and some vague cloud in which it was difficult to isolate a specific image. Scientists have tried many different variants of the experiment, but without much success.
now researchers from Baylor University, it seems, came to “ten”. They include electrodes not simultaneously, but sequentially. In the end, the letter was gradually drawn to the visual cortex. As if the man leads the finger on the palm of your hand, repeating the outline of some letters.
In the experiments, subjects had to touch the screen to paint with your fingers the figure which is “seen” their brain, which was sent to the electrode signals. And all have successfully coped with the task, and one of the volunteers showed a very good result: a minute was able to recognize 86 of electrode shapes. And although the test used is quite simple symbols, like the letters S, W, N, U, the authors believe that the same way you can pass into the brain and more complex image. The results were published in the journal Cell.
