Neuralink Brain Implant Allows Monkey to See Non-Existent Object
Speaking at a conference on Friday, Neuralink engineer Joseph O’Doherty said he and his colleagues had stimulated the brain of a monkey with a Blindsight implant, causing it to have a kind of visual hallucination. The authors believe that for at least two-thirds of the time, the animal was able to see something that wasn’t there.
The Blindsight experiments were the first publicly confirmed results of the development that Neuralink officially announced. The company intends to create a device capable of restoring vision to blind patients — and in the future, expanding visual perception beyond the natural capabilities of humans. According to engineers, tests on monkeys are convenient in terms of access to the visual cortex — it is located closer to the surface of the brain than in humans. For human patients, according to Neuralink’s plans, the chip will be implanted in deeper areas of the brain using a specialized surgical robot already developed by the startup.
Neuralink is speaking publicly for the first time about its testing of the Blindsight implant. It is too early to talk about human clinical trials because the device has not yet received regulatory approval in the U.S.
