(YouTube) Elon Musk again making unfounded claims or suggestions: "Even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision; so, because the visual part of the cortex is still there; so, yeah, even if they've never seen before, we are confident that they could see." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4&t=1951s #Neuralink #BCI #NeuroTech #neuroscience #blindness #blind #perception
@tilo @seeingwithsound I totally agree with @seeingwithsound. Especially with all the crossmodal plasticity that occurs with losing vision early in life, we really need to work on restoring visual cortex plasticity to be able to recovery vision.
It's compounded by the fact that the adult brain has less plasticity and we'll need better understanding of the types of changes produced by congenital blindness to even understand what is needed to recover visual processing in the visual cortex.
In any event, even with the best visual prosthesis (whether peripheral or central), the signals will be very crude, so the adult brain must learn how to interpret these signals before it can use the information. Adult cortical plasticity is one of the things we're actively studying in my lab. Hope we'll figure this out 
@seeingwithsound I'd personally prefer non-invasive methods as long-term electrode implants can problems on their own. I am interested in your vOICe device. Certainly it has potential. It seems to have quite a bit of learning curve, so hopefully whatever we find that can help boost adult cortical plasticity could be useful for your device as well
@hkl Yes, the learning curve with The vOICe is perhaps its biggest challenge, which is why I embarked a few months ago on training myself to gain insight in the main hurdles and frustrations, experimenting with new training paradigms, considering drug options, whatever it takes. There is a strong need for more people looking at the challenges from different angles. You are welcome to contact me anytime to discuss options https://www.seeingwithsound.com/contact.htm
@hkl @seeingwithsound Paul Bach-y-rita used to say that putting the BrainPort into the hands of children would get the best results. It is probably similar with visual implants in the future.
@kevinrj @seeingwithsound That certainly is the case for recovering speech perception with artificial cochlear implants in deaf. The implants need to be done quite early to gain speech perception.
I presume similar will work for visual implants as well.
While this is all good, we do want to recover functionality in adults as well. Hopefully with more research
@hkl Thanks! To be clear: I'm not at all against invasive approaches as such, as the jury is still out on what will work best, invasive or non-invasive approaches, and for whom, late-blind "vs" early blind, in view of (crossmodal) plasticity, age, etc. It is up to us to cut through the hype and bias, and I am definitely interested in the work at your lab!