This week on the Nature Careers Podcast: The brain science collaboration that offers hope to blind people
, and in this series we speak to brain scientists all over the world about their life, their research, their collaborations, and the impact of their work.
But then you have to kind of group that together into a representation of objects and the several objects that may surround you. And that’s a very fascinating subject. So of all the things that surround you, you can pay attention, pick out one of those items, what happens in the brain when you direct your attention to something.
So we approach that from several angles. So one is to do modelling. Second is to study vision in humans, just having them respond with a button press, understanding what they can and cannot see. And so, at some point, we reached a standard preparation where we implant, say, 200 electrodes, and then we thought, you know, we could multiply this with a small factor. And then we know that from previous work, that if you stimulate one electrode electrically, you're artificially activating these brain cells close to the tip of the electrode. And a person or an experimental animal , they'll see a dot of light. And that's with only one electrode.
So we were able to write, for instance, we trained, we did this in monkeys. We trained them to recognize letters. But we also have many collaborations with experts around the world, people who really know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue too much. And these camera images are sent to a small computer. It can be the size of a phone. And this will take in the camera image and create from it a pattern to be a post on the matrix boards in the brain.
Yes, eyesight works. It starts, of course, all in the retina, that's at the back of the eye, which is a very, very sophisticated device. And then if you go to higher regions, then this information of these individual detectors is combined in more and more sophisticated ways. So basically, what happens there is that you go from pixels, to concepts. And there are now many people modelling this.
And you need to know where it is, you need to know how to position all your joints, all your joints. And so all these transformations, they are also in part informed by vision. So that's another very important role for vision to play.So one thing that is, I think, exciting in this domain is the possibility now to occasionally record also neurons from human patients, and some researchers in my lab are doing this.
So if you record from these single neurons, you can also do amazing things. So other people, but also in our lab, sometimes you can, for instance, make associations between stimuli. Yeah, so we are not recreating the eye. So we're just skipping it. So I think that's also why the vision that we're going to produce is, it’s just much less quality than the normal vision.
You have to realize that the primary visual cortex, which is the first region where the information comes from, the visual information that is processed in the cortex is huge. It has a surface area of 25 square centimetres on the left, and another 25 square centimetres on the right. So we are now at the moment using so-called Juta electrode arrays. So these are arrays of stiff silicone shanks, we call them. So like, like a bed of nails, is basically what it looks like.
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