Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College are developing a prosthetic device for treating certain kinds of blindness.
Sheila Nirenberg is a physiologist at Weill Cornell Medical College.
She studies how the brain processes information—that is, how it takes information in from the outside world and converts it into patterns of electrical activity that allows you to do things like see, hear, and reach for an object.
In a recent TED Talk, she described a new way to create sight in people with certain kinds of blindness.
“There are ten million people in the U.S., and many more worldwide, who are blind or facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, and there is little that can be done for them,” Nirenberg said. “There are some drug treatments, but they’re only effective on a small fraction of the population. So for the vast majority of patients, their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices.”
Her device involves hooking into the eye’s optic nerve and sending signals from a camera directly to the brain.
She says understanding how the brain processes images is key to curing blindness.
“Understanding the code is really important, if we can understand the code, things seem possible that didn’t seem possible before.”
For more about her work, check out the Nirenberg Lab.
