Claims by tech billionaire Elon Musk that Blindsight – an implant to restore vision – “may ultimately exceed normal human vision” are unrealistic at best, according to a study from the University of Washington (UW).1
UW professor of psychology, Ione Fine, said Mr Musk’s projection for the Neuralink project rests on the flawed premise that implanting millions of tiny electrodes into the visual cortex will result in highresolution vision.
Prof Fine and colleagues created a computational model that simulates the experience of a wide range of human cortical studies, including an extremely high-resolution implant like Blindsight.1 One simulation shows a crystal-clear movie of a cat at a resolution of 45,000 pixels, but a movie simulating the experience of a patient with 45,000 electrodes implanted in the visual cortex would perceive the cat as blurry.
“That’s because a single electrode doesn’t represent a pixel,” Prof Fine said.
“Engineers often think of electrodes as producing pixels,” Prof Fine said, “but that is simply not how biology works. We hope that our simulations… can give insight into how these implants are going to perform.”
Prof Fine said Mr Musk is making important strides in visual implants but “even to get to typical human vision, you would not only have to align an electrode to each cell in the visual cortex, but you’d also have to stimulate it with the appropriate (neural) code”.
Reference
- Fine I, Boynton GM. A virtual patient simulation modeling the neural and perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation, from pulse trains to percepts. Sci Rep 14, 17400 (2024). doi: 10.1038/ s41598-024-65337-1.
