Brain implants might soon help restore rudimentary vision for blind people

Restoring vision for visually impaired people might soon be a reality with the help of brain implants, due to recent discoveries at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), which were published in the journal Science. The study has revealed that newly developed high-resolution implants in the visual cortex of people who are blind will make it possible for them to understand artificially induced percepts and shapes. The concept of stimulating the brain via an implant to generate artificial visual percepts is not new at all and dates back to the 1970s. However, the existing systems can only generate a small number of these artificial "pixels" at any given time. Researchers from a team led by Pieter Roelfsema at NIN are now using new implant production and implantation technologies, advanced materials engineering, microchip manufacturing, and microelectronics, to develop more stable devices and durable than previous implants. The initial results are very promising. Electrical stimulation. When electrical stimulation is delivered to the brain via an implanted electrode, it generates the perception of a point of light at a particular location in visual space, known as a "phosphene". The team developed high-resolution implants consisting of 1,024 electrodes and implanted them in the visual cortex of two sighted monkeys. The monkeys during the research were first required to perform a simple behavioral task in which they made eye movements in order to signal the location of a phosphene that was triggered during electrical stimulation by an individual electrode.