Neuralink's Blindsight visual implant is about to arrive, bypassing the eyes to write directly to the visual cortex

Elon is awesome! Musk has just unveiled the next ace from his brain-computer interface company Neuralink: a visual implant called Blindsight is about to arrive.

Even if a person is completely blind, this device can bypass the eyeballs and write images directly into the brain's visual cortex.

In the video, he laid it out: when the first-generation product is first implanted, it can only provide low-resolution basic images at first,

but the endpoint of this technology is not at all to help blind people recover to a normal person's 1.0 vision, but to let people grow high-definition multispectral vision that surpasses physiological limits, directly seeing infrared, ultraviolet, and even radar signals with the naked eye.

In the past, when the medical field developed artificial retinas or blind-assistance devices, the default approach was always to repair the damaged organ: if the eye is broken, fix the eye; if photoreceptor cells die, stimulate the remaining nerves. The ceiling was always locked within the physiological limits of a healthy human eye as it comes from the factory.

But Musk has directly overturned this repair logic. Since the human eye is just a biological camera that can only receive an extremely narrow band of visible light, once a brain-computer interface bypasses the eyeball and optic nerve and writes digital signals directly into the visual cortex in the brain's occipital lobe, what sensors are connected at the front end is completely free from the limits of the biological body.

This is like an old television whose antenna has been struck by lightning. Traditional medicine climbs onto the roof and tries every way to weld that broken antenna back together, at best receiving a few blurry local channels,

whereas Blindsight simply pulls out the antenna and plugs a high-definition digital fiber optic cable into the TV's motherboard. If you connect a night-vision device to the other end of the fiber, what you see in your brain is infrared thermal imaging; connect a millimeter-wave radar, and what emerges in your brain is a radar wave map that sees through walls. For everyone paying attention to brain-computer interfaces and hardware evolution, this is a huge watershed. When the purpose of medical devices shifts from repairing patients back to normal people to directly opening a hardware interface to external sensors for the brain, the earliest beneficiaries are indeed blind patients, but one step across, and it becomes a sensory add-on that even healthy people would envy.

But stripping away the glamour on stage, the other side of the coin is actually quite grim. Musk himself is the leader best at using ultimate sci-fi visions to pave the way for current engineering,

and in the video he only shouted that it is coming soon, without explaining how far human clinical approval has progressed,

moreover, the brain's visual cortex has been accustomed to visible-light signals for millions of years. Suddenly forcing streams of infrared and radar wave data into it—whether the human brain can decode meaningful images, and whether long-term electrode implantation will trigger cortical rejection and scar aging—all must wait for the real data from the first batch of low-resolution clinical subjects to speak.

What traditional medicine pursues is to restore the incomplete body to factory settings, while what brain-computer interfaces scheme to do is to directly pry open the factory lock on human senses. https://t.co/KHVP0unJhF