Implants buried deep in the brain may be the best hope yet for building bionic eyes to restore vision.
Most visual prosthetics rely on implants behind the retina, which stimulate nerve cells and generate visual sensations or phosphenes in the brain. Such prosthetics require a detailed map of where phosphenes will appear in the person’s brain in response to electrical stimulation of a given nerve cell. Once the map is complete, partly through trial and error, digital images can be converted into electrical pulses that allow blind people to “see”.
In patients with severe eye damage, however, there are not…
