Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was
several decades ago, fraught with risk, applicable only to a narrowly defined
set of patients – but a sign of things to come.
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you
see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any
conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip,
wired directly into your brain's hippocampus, that gave you perfect recall of
everything you read?
Or for an implanted interface with the Internet that
automatically translated a clearly articulated silent thought ("the French
sun king") into an online search that digested the relevant Wikipedia page
and projected a summary directly into your brain?
Science fiction? Perhaps not for very much longer.
Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago. They
are not risk-free and make sense only for a narrowly defined set of
patients—but they are a sign of things to come.
Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns or implantable
insulin pumps, neuroprosthetics—devices that restore or supplement the mind's
capacities with electronics inserted directly into the nervous system—change
how we perceive the world and move through it. For better or worse, these
devices become part of who we are.
Neuroprosthetics aren't new. They have been around
commercially for three decades, in the form of the cochlear implants used in
the ears (the outer reaches of the nervous system) of more than 300,000
hearing-impaired people around the world. Last year, the Food and Drug
Administration approved the first retinal implant, made by the company Second
Sight.
Both technologies exploit the same principle: An
external device, either a microphone or a video camera, captures sounds or
images and processes them, using the results to drive a set of electrodes that
stimulate either the auditory or the optic nerve, approximating the naturally
occurring output from the ear or the eye.
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