In the journal Nature an article was publishedin which scientists from the University of Washington (UW) refuted Elon Musk’s claim about the future superior capabilities of the Blindsight implant for returning or giving sight to blind or visually impaired people. Musk is not familiar with the workings of the brain, and vision is not a set of pixels, the scientists said. Everything is much more complicated and technology is not capable of rising to the level of living tissue, much less surpassing it.
Image source: Computerra
In March of this year, it became known that Elon Musk’s Neuralink company was developing and even testing a cortical implant called Blindsight. After the obvious success of Neuralink’s brain implant for restoring communication functions to patients with spinal cord injuries, the news of a new miracle implant for restoring vision was received with enthusiasm. Vision loss is a fairly common occurrence in medical practice, not to mention congenital defects of this kind. Often, vision steadily deteriorates as people age, and today this is perceived as an inevitable evil.
On March 20, 2024, Musk posted a short message on his X social media account about the company’s next product, the Blindsight implant. “The resolution (of artificial vision) will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but eventually it could exceed normal human vision,” Musk later explained on X. Scientists at the University of Washington latched onto the phrase and tried to figure out if that was true.
Electrode array models and how videos of cats would be processed in the visual cortex. Image credit: Fine, I & Boynton, G/CC By 4.0
To study the possibilities of an artificial stimulus of the cortical cells of the visual cortex of the brain – without the participation of vision and channels for transmitting signals directly through the nervous tissue to the brain – a simple computer model was used as “virtual patients”. Scientists showed that the position of engineers that the brain receives signals like pixels on a matrix or display screen does not correspond to the real state of affairs. The simulation clearly showed how a patient with a certain number of pixels would see, for example, a cat.
In a regular image of a cat from a 44 thousand pixel array, the animal is visible with sufficient quality. But if the same array irritates neurons in the visual cortex of the brain, the situation changes dramatically for the worse. In the video, scientists showed how this would look. One can only guess about the presence of a cat in the frame.
The problem, the researchers explain, is that the image is fed to the neurons in an overlapping and coding manner. Each neuron responsible for vision receives a complex (coded) signal from an array of sensory cells in the eye, called the receptive field. The information is also sent to more than one neuron. Simply stimulating brain cells is not the same as normal vision and is unlikely to ever approach, let alone surpass, the quality of normal human vision. Even millions of “pixels” — the high resolution of a neuron-stimulating implant — will not solve the problem of coding visual information to above-average quality.
Scientists have not ruled out a breakthrough in this area, but they urge caution in talking about returning excellent vision to people today. This could give rise to unjustified expectations that will be dashed by reality and make patients vulnerable.
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