Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

I'll let other blind people go first, but I'm definitely some one that would love, love, love to be able to see. Driving, knowing body language, playing any and every video game out there, shoot yeah!

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.

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.

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.