Home
01
Join Us, In Saving Lives And Engineering The Future
We are a diverse team of talented people who are dedicated to building technology that radically improves human lives.
March 22, 2022
On-Demand
Listen to Pieter R. Roelfsema, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam; Institute de la Vision, Paris to find out how future visual prostheses for the blind will directly present camera footage onto the visual brain, skipping malfunctioning eyes.
Pieter will discuss the mechanisms that determine whether a weak visual stimulus will reach consciousness or not. If the stimulus is simple, early visual cortex acts as a relay station that sends the information to higher visual areas. If the stimulus arrives at a minimal strength, it will be stored in working memory. However, during more complex visual perceptions, which for example depend on the segregation of a figure from the background, early visual cortex’ role goes beyond a simple relay. It acts as a cognitive blackboard and conscious perception depends on it. Their results also inspire new approaches to create a visual prosthesis for the blind, by creating a direct interface with the visual cortex. Finally, Pieter will discuss how high-channel-number interfaces with the visual cortex might be used to restore a rudimentary form of vision in blind individuals.
