Eduardo Fernandez and coworkers published an article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Volume 14, August 2020, entitled “Toward Long-Term Communication with the Brain in the Blind by Intracortical Stimulation: Challenges and Future Prospects.” This very current article presents several important points that apply to interaction with neural synaptic pathways in vision. This remarkable technological application is very much in process, but to date indicates how investigators are applying some of the principles of dualist interaction to the needs of visually impaired patients. The possibility of restoring vision utilizing neural prosthetic devices is designed to bypass damaged visual pathways. We shall see that there is an absence of mention of cognitive perception by the immaterial mind, all physiological visual components reduced, it appears, to the workings of the brain itself. I will post several quotes from their article.
“All of the prosthetic devices work by exchanging information between the electronic [sensory] devices and different types of neurons. . . . several researchers are trying to develop visual prostheses designed to directly stimulate the brain. . . . a blind individual could use . . . artificially encoded neural information. . . . Although we see with the brain [the authors do not include visual perception by the immaterial cognitive mind by which neural codes are interpreted], the input information to the visual system begins at the eye, which catches and focuses light onto the retina. . . . The output neurons of the retina are the ganglion cells, which send their axons . . . through the optic nerve to the brain. This means that, in order to encode all the features of objects in the visual space . . . and the change of these features in time in the same way that the human retina does, we would need at least 1 million parallel channels. . . . Although ongoing studies suggest that electrical stimulation via multiple electrodes may give rise to useful vision . . . the device must be wireless [hence the role of the transmission of wave forms between a sensor replacing the retina where encoding begins and the neural components of the visual cortex]. . . . a key issue for the future success of cortical visual implants is related to how the brain understands artificially encoded information. [Again, no mention is made of the cognitive interpretation of neural codes by the immaterial mind.] . . . We should try to develop specific strategies to communicate with the brain of the blind in order to increase the chances of extracting useful information from the artificially encoded stimulation.”
This is exciting research, giving great promise to the visually impaired! In reading these quotations and my own comments it is my hope that one can appreciate the awesome intelligent design by our Creator God of the human visual sense! The principal question, in my view, is how encoded stimuli sent wirelessly to implanted intracortical microelectrodes will interface with neural memory codes established over a lifetime and archived in memory in the parts of the brain that function in vision. It is a daunting challenge!