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> Is the implant upgradable?

I wonder how many blind people are going to hold off on this in the hopes that it gets better in five years.

> a second to restore perception

I imagine that this is aimed at people who've gone blind, and therefore have all the neural infrastructure to see and perceive; but it does raise an interesting point of what would happen if you implanted this in someone who was blind from birth. (It brings to mind deaf-from-birth people who have rejected their aural implants, though I think that was largely due to the crapiness of the state of technology at the time, everything sounded like it was being shouted through a pipe full of tin foil and gravel.)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness provides a succinct overview of Molyneux's Problem, a philosophical thought experiment that attempts to address this very issue.

This quote is especially interesting from a 13 year old whose sight was restored in 1728: "When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment of distances, that he thought all object whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin"


Oliver Sacks book: "An Anthropologist on Mars" covered a case of this happening.

There is an interesting writeup with some background at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/visblind.html




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