Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton publish research showing that cortical implants unlikely to exceed normal human vision
Professors Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton published new research showing that cortical implants like Elon Musk’s Blindsight are unlikely to ‘exceed normal human vision.’
For the study, published July 29 in Scientific Reports, the researchers created a computational model that simulates the experience of a wide range of human cortical studies, including an extremely high-resolution implant like Elon Musk’s Blindsight. One simulation shows that a movie of a cat at a resolution of 45,000 pixels is crystal-clear, but a movie simulating the experience of a patient with 45,000 electrodes implanted in the visual cortex would perceive the cat as blurry and barely recognizable.
Elon Musk recently declared on X that Blindsight, a cortical implant to restore vision, would have low resolution at first “but may ultimately exceed normal human vision.” Fine said Musk’s projection for the latest Neuralink project rests on the flawed premise that implanting millions of tiny electrodes into the visual cortex, the region of the brain that processes information received from the eye, will result in high-resolution vision.
Read the UW News press release here: https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/07/29/uw-model-shows-cortical-implants-like-elon-musks-blindsight-unlikely-to-exceed-normal-human-vision/