Talking to the Brain in Its Own Language

Professor Sheila Nirenberg (Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Weill Medical College, Cornell University) is developing a computerized eyeglass prosthetic that transmits coded visual information along the pathway to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. The encoder replaces the guts of retinal circuitry with a set of mathematical algorithms that emerge as electrical impulses, an abstraction of what the retina does. This new strategy holds significant promise for treating blindness.