Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

From what I've read, if you are blind from birth, but visual signals were suddenly restored, your brain wouldn't know how to process them. Blind from birth = blind forever. I'm not certain though.

I think the brain would adapt. It may take a while but the brain is very flexible and adaptable.

According to research impaired structural brain development due to visual deprivation from birth is not fully reversible and limits functional recovery. So even if eye sight is fully restored, cortical function will not be able to fully take advantage of that.

Experiments and studies have shown that this might be due to the fact that the visual cortex will take over a similar role in blind people as it does for people with intact eye sight. The brain uses different sensory inputs in that case and the visual brain structure is not restored after eye sight recovery.

This is still an ongoing field of research of course, but so far congenital blindless seems to be incurable, regardless of whether the sensory apparatus could be restored or replaced. Note that this only means seeing like a non-blind person. Some limited visual perception is still possible, just not "normal" sight.

"Blind" has way more of a wide definition than we usually appreciate.

I volunteer at a food pantry. There is one old lady who is sometimes rude in the line, shoving through saying "move it, I'm blind!!" She sometimes informs me that produce I hand her has black spots and she doesn't want it.

I believe she may actually be legally blind.

Do you have some links handy? I'd be very much interested in the description of experience from people that have gained sight after congenital blindness.

Black spots often have a different feeling on produce.

I have family like this. They can see enough 'shape' to play something like Tetris extremely well but anything that relies on colors is usually a no. When we were young they had color but that went away first. My understanding is that as they get older the resolution of the shapes gets lower and lower, so they have to make things bigger and be as close as possible.

It was beyond the point of glasses being able to do anything useful for them just as they finished college.

Depending on the task[1], it takes 1 week[2] to 1 year[3].

1. https://news.mit.edu/2011/vision-problem-0411

2. Shape recognition

3. Face recognition

Case studies suggest otherwise, at least for most people.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not...

That's a good point. I'm fairly certain that lady has said that to me before touching the food. I think some legally blind people are good with shapes and big contrasts. She may also be relying on smell and not expressing it.

If they have any sight at all, their ability to cope with that limited sight would also be greatly increased; that is, if their resolution is significantly lower, their relative contrast may be much higher, even if what the object is is much less clear, without context.

If you are young enough, yes. But after a while, the neuroplasticity is simply not enough. Seeing is a complex enough process, if you miss learning it in your childhood, the train is gone. This is a very common error people make, announcing implant technologies to grown blind people as if the cure was just around the corner. It isn't. You will never adapt to a point where the vision you just gained is actually useful. Imagine trying to learn to read print, at 30, with a pixelated implant? It is a naiv pixie dream of sighted people.

don't have full article access but this part near the top makes it not applicable to the situation being discussed (blind from birth)

> since early childhood

Some part of this is true, but it’s complicated.

I lack stereoscopic vision, due to eye surgery in infancy & wildly different focal lengths in each eye (one is very nearsighted, the other farsighted).

I can still see in 3D because my brain uses tricks like relative object size, shadows, and sometimes I move my head laterally so my farsighted eye gets different angles on an object (“faking” stereoscopic vision with one eye).

Nonetheless, catching a ball thrown straight at me is very difficult— I have to judge the size at which the circle is getting larger, and know the actual size of the ball. It often hits me in the hand and I try to grab it before it bounces away.

And I can never see those stereogram images where it looks like static unless you focus both eyes at some distance. I never see the world with both eyes simultaneously.

I once got glasses that corrected my vision “perfectly” but got major headaches and couldn’t wear them. Objects were in focus in both eyes, but were wildly different sizes!

I went to an ophthalmologist who basically told me they can correct my lenses but in my brain “the wiring is shot”.

I mostly work in front of a computer screen. I now use reading glasses so that when my nearsighted eye gets tired, I can put them on and continue working with my farsighted eye. These glasses have only a minor correction on the nearsighted eye so they don’t give me headaches.

You might be interested in searching up "strong critical periods" in brain development - this phenomenon has been studied for decades and has interesting implications for lots of aspects of brain development: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period

Do you notice any difference in thinking when you are “left eye active” vs “right eye active” in front of the screen or reading ? Asking because I have a much milder version of the situation that you describe (still within the boundaries to make it work without the glasses almost all the time), but I notice a weird “not the same” feeling when I am using not the eye I am used to.

Interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, and I haven’t noticed different thinking. But I switch back and forth all the time. Like writing this I’m using my nearsighted eye, but if I look across the room my vision switches to my farsighted eye (more or less instantly).

The thing other people notice is after I’ve had a long day of screen time and am physically tired (long day, late night), and I’m out with friends, my farsighted eye does all the work and my nearsighted eye gets lazy and wanders. It’s got nothing to do and can take a break! I’ve heard many a good-natured joke about it over the years.

In a way it strengthens it since even if he became blind later one, still:

> It was, rather, the behavior of one mentally blind, or agnosic—able to see but not to decipher what he was seeing.

And while he does get better, it does end up with:

> But then, paradoxically, a release was given, in the form of a second and now final blindness—a blindness he received as a gift.

Cf: https://web.archive.org/web/20240111185639/https://www.newyo... (older version does not trigger the paywall or at least can disable it while it's loading).

Same here - but I can switch my vision for screen tasks to either only near-sighted (by being about 25cm away), or to far-sighted (by being about 70cm away). If I am doing that in the middle of the task, it feels a tiny bit “strange”.

Ah I see what you mean. For me I don't think there is any distance where both near & far eye could each have focus -- it's always too blurry in one or the other. I could see how being able to consciously switch would feel weird!

I'm curious -- if you held a stereogram at the right distance, could you see the 3D image? Or is it also like me, only one eye at a time?

This is fascinating! Did they ever discuss/consider taking incremental steps with the glasses from your current state to what perfect should be? I could make hypothesises for multiple outcomes here but don't actually understand any of the fundamental systems to know which outcome is most likely.

It makes me wonder if you had been given lenses that started at small corrections, and you switched them out for greater corrections could allow your brain to adjust. Like the Invisalign of glasses. People are often able to adjust to diminishing eyesight, adapting and finding ways to make use of what is left, so it seems that if your vision got slightly better every two weeks, your brain could adapt and adjust. Hell, people are able to adjust to wearing mirror glasses that flip everything upside down, so eventually your brain would probably adjust and correct for the size difference.

The upside down glasses is a good example. As I understand it, after you get used to wearing them and then take them off, you see everything upside down with your regular eyes, and it takes a while to get back to normal. Doesn’t sound fun.

But in my case I don’t think even that would work. Elaborating further on the ophthalmologist’s words (and as another poster here noted), the neuroplasticity required to develop stereoscopic vision is just not there past some age. No amount of lens trickery will join the left-right circuits in the cortex.

I had to do a little bit of “cross-eyeing” and then I can see something that does look like 3D. That said, my eyes are a little weird this way - back in childhood I trained to move them separately as well - a great party trick to freak out the people ! :-))