5 ms·

Many people who are blind since birth (including myself) are pretty skeptical of such technologies. There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless

Many people who are blind since birth (including myself) are pretty skeptical of such technologies. There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. An adult brain just can't make sense of those impulses. Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier. It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.

lordnacho 6y ago
This is a really interesting comment. How do you know what resolution is? I hope you don't mind me asking.
- stallmanite 6y ago
  I’m not blind and don’t personally know any blind people but I can imagine that blind people have heard of television at this point and the more curious among them have familiarized themselves with the technical implementation. Therefore a blind person understanding what resolution means shouldn’t necessarily be surprising.
- codezero 6y ago
  Another guess waiting for authoritative source: it could possibly be applied when talking about the quality of a braille pattern (assuming that's something one does) :) Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light The article goes on to state that the trial used 10 of these. So I guess the quality would work equivalently to a 40x40 pixel resolution or something.
devindotcom 6y ago
Exactly, there is also the consideration of the type of blindness. Retinal blindness is very common due to injuries and conditions like diabetes, and a retinal implant connecting to an otherwise functional visual pathway is probably the easiest case to solve for. For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.
Robotbeat 6y ago
i wonder if plasticity could be restored locally.
GrantZvolsky 6y ago
> There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia. My paediatrician failed to diagnose congenital hyperopia which resulted in amblyopia by the age of five. After a couple of years of eyepatches I was told my vision in the affected eye would never improve. My ophthalmologist explained that past the age of five the brain doesn't have the neuroplasticity to "learn to see" with the amblyopic eye. To describe the condition, it feels as though the affected eye sees in very low resolution. I was somehow able to know what word I'm looking at after staring at it for a couple of seconds, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't tell individual letters apart. At university, when my nonamblyopic eye got overstrained, I would patch it and use the amblyopic eye with the aid of software screen magnification. A couple of years later I realized that my formerly amblyopic eye suddenly sees almost as well as the nonamblyopic one. I suspect the fact that my amblyopic eye was unwittingly overprescribed by 1 diopter might have played a role by giving it an advantage for reading even when not using an eyepatch.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Are you saying that reading with the overprescribed lens trained your eye to see?
  - GrantZvolsky 6y ago
    I'm not an expert, but it certainly gave the amblyopic eye an advantage for close range which is where the nonamblyopic eye was struggling after a day of study/work. The base value in my calculation is a regular prescription, so adding one diopter would put it in the area of a reading glasses prescription.
- klipt 6y ago
  Maybe having sight in one eye means your brain already "knows" how to process it, and just needs to learn to redirect the input from the other eye to the visual processing center somehow? Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.
- el_benhameen 6y ago
eloff 6y ago
I understand your skepticism, and possibly a reluctance to be drawn in by false hope. It might well be very limited and very poor in the beginning. But I think it's very much worth seeing what can be accomplished and how much we can improve on it. It's early days for this kind of intervention.
- neuronic 6y ago
  We are continuously amazed at neuroplasticity so, possibly, sight maybe useless for a while after gaining it but with everything we know about the brain one single aspect persists through all topics: the brain adapts.
smogcutter 6y ago
Sorry to say I can’t recall enough details to find a source, but I read an article once about a man who had been blind since birth, but as an adult was able to have his vision restored surgically. It was a catastrophe. His brain was like an untrained neural net - the input was there, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He described it as seeing an undifferentiated field of color, where he couldn’t distinguish objects. Blind, he was able to confidently live his life and get around his city (I believe NY but no promises). Sighted, he was terrified to cross the street. On the other hand, I figure that if there’s a concern that laymen immediately raise, medical researchers are well aware of it as well. If they’re going forward, there’s a reason.
- mattigames 6y ago
  Then the next problem to tackle is restore plasticity, at least enough to make sense of the new input.
- tikiet 6y ago
  "To See and Not See" in An Anthropologist on Mars, which is a story about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings
nisse72 6y ago
Oliver Sacks wrote about a man who was born sighted but lost his sight due to cataracts at a very young age. 50 years later he had surgery and "regained" his sight, but found the world very difficult to navigate using vision, and he could not make any sense of things like TV images. It's an interesting story. If anyone is interested, the title is "To see and not see", and comes from this collection: https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/anthropologist-mars/ https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/anthropolo... Paywalled here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not-see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not... Short excerpt: http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf

lordnacho 6y ago

This is a really interesting comment. How do you know what resolution is? I hope you don't mind me asking.

stallmanite 6y ago
I’m not blind and don’t personally know any blind people but I can imagine that blind people have heard of television at this point and the more curious among them have familiarized themselves with the technical implementation. Therefore a blind person understanding what resolution means shouldn’t necessarily be surprising.
codezero 6y ago
Another guess waiting for authoritative source: it could possibly be applied when talking about the quality of a braille pattern (assuming that's something one does) :) Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
uniqueid 6y ago
Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light The article goes on to state that the trial used 10 of these. So I guess the quality would work equivalently to a 40x40 pixel resolution or something.

devindotcom 6y ago

Exactly, there is also the consideration of the type of blindness. Retinal blindness is very common due to injuries and conditions like diabetes, and a retinal implant connecting to an otherwise functional visual pathway is probably the easiest case to solve for. For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.

Robotbeat 6y ago

i wonder if plasticity could be restored locally.

GrantZvolsky 6y ago

> There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia. My paediatrician failed to diagnose congenital hyperopia which resulted in amblyopia by the age of five. After a couple of years of eyepatches I was told my vision in the affected eye would never improve. My ophthalmologist explained that past the age of five the brain doesn't have the neuroplasticity to "learn to see" with the amblyopic eye. To describe the condition, it feels as though the affected eye sees in very low resolution. I was somehow able to know what word I'm looking at after staring at it for a couple of seconds, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't tell individual letters apart. At university, when my nonamblyopic eye got overstrained, I would patch it and use the amblyopic eye with the aid of software screen magnification. A couple of years later I realized that my formerly amblyopic eye suddenly sees almost as well as the nonamblyopic one. I suspect the fact that my amblyopic eye was unwittingly overprescribed by 1 diopter might have played a role by giving it an advantage for reading even when not using an eyepatch.

darkerside 6y ago
Are you saying that reading with the overprescribed lens trained your eye to see?
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but it certainly gave the amblyopic eye an advantage for close range which is where the nonamblyopic eye was struggling after a day of study/work. The base value in my calculation is a regular prescription, so adding one diopter would put it in the area of a reading glasses prescription.
klipt 6y ago
Maybe having sight in one eye means your brain already "knows" how to process it, and just needs to learn to redirect the input from the other eye to the visual processing center somehow? Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.
el_benhameen 6y ago

eloff 6y ago

I understand your skepticism, and possibly a reluctance to be drawn in by false hope. It might well be very limited and very poor in the beginning. But I think it's very much worth seeing what can be accomplished and how much we can improve on it. It's early days for this kind of intervention.

neuronic 6y ago
We are continuously amazed at neuroplasticity so, possibly, sight maybe useless for a while after gaining it but with everything we know about the brain one single aspect persists through all topics: the brain adapts.

smogcutter 6y ago

Sorry to say I can’t recall enough details to find a source, but I read an article once about a man who had been blind since birth, but as an adult was able to have his vision restored surgically. It was a catastrophe. His brain was like an untrained neural net - the input was there, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He described it as seeing an undifferentiated field of color, where he couldn’t distinguish objects. Blind, he was able to confidently live his life and get around his city (I believe NY but no promises). Sighted, he was terrified to cross the street. On the other hand, I figure that if there’s a concern that laymen immediately raise, medical researchers are well aware of it as well. If they’re going forward, there’s a reason.

mattigames 6y ago
Then the next problem to tackle is restore plasticity, at least enough to make sense of the new input.
tikiet 6y ago
"To See and Not See" in An Anthropologist on Mars, which is a story about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings

nisse72 6y ago

Oliver Sacks wrote about a man who was born sighted but lost his sight due to cataracts at a very young age. 50 years later he had surgery and "regained" his sight, but found the world very difficult to navigate using vision, and he could not make any sense of things like TV images. It's an interesting story. If anyone is interested, the title is "To see and not see", and comes from this collection: https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/anthropologist-mars/ https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/anthropolo... Paywalled here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not-see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not... Short excerpt: http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf