Brain implants to restore sight, like Neuralink’s Blindsight, face a fundamental problem − more pixels don’t ensure better vision

Dr Ione Fine, Associate Professor at University of Washington and University of Leeds, writes for the Conversation about the latest technologies in restoring eyesight.

In the piece, Professor Fine explains how she worked with collaborator Geoffrey Boynton, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington, to create a computational model of human vision to simulate what sort of vision an extremely high-resolution cortical implant might provide.

A movie of a cat with a resolution of 45,000 pixels is sharp and clear. A movie generated using a simplified version of a model of 45,000 cortical electrodes, each of which stimulates a single neuron, still has a recognizable cat but most of the details of the scene are lost.

The reason why the movie generated by electrodes is so blurry is because neurons in the human visual cortex do not represent tiny dots or pixels. Instead, each neuron has a particular receptive field, which is the location and pattern a visual stimulus must have in order to make that neuron fire.

Read the full article on the Conversation.