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Tounge as a display point. (Was artificial vision for the blind... or is it?)

--- Robin Lee Powell <>
wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 05:06:55AM -0400, Francois
> wrote:
> > 
> > being bored the other day and watching ripley's
> believe it or
> > not... i came across this:
> > 
> > http://www.dobelle.com/
> > 
> > apparently this is last year's news on cnn and
> wired, but i'd not
> > heard of it before nor seen mention of it on the
> list.  
> > 
> > basically they drill a hole in the skull, toss in
> some electrodes
> > which connect to a jack going to a wearable going
> to a glasses
> > mounted camera.
> 
> It does work, but it's *very* low res.
> 
> -Robin
> 
At work I picked up this months or last months issue
of Discover, and they had a story in there which
talked about the plasticity of the brain. 

http://www.discover.com/june_03/feattongue.html 

People switching ferret's wiring around so that their
optic nerves tied in with their auditory centers and
they developed normal vision. Supposedly. Furthermore,
they wired up a web cam with a 144 pixel output, and
had an alectrode grid of 144 points sitting on the
author's TOUNGE (?!?!?!) and even blindfolded he was
able to catch a ball rolled to him, and pick up a cube
from the table in front of him 9 times out of 10. He
could even recognize large letters. I dare say that it
might be possible to somehow get something meaningful
out of some sort of tongue-based output device. Or any
other part of your body that had sufficient
"resolution" to be able to differentiate distinct
stimuli. (My psychology room mate showed me a trick
once where he touched my back and i couldn't tell if
it was one or two fingers if the distance was an inch
or so apart, so you need close-togetehr nerve
endings). 

There are OTHER places other than your tounge that
have lots of nerve endings, but THOSE sorts of
peripherals might best be left to the future. :)

Robin 

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