During a town hall in Wisconsin streamed live on YouTube on Monday, Elon Musk announced his brain-computer interface implant startup Neuralink will perform its first human implant of Blindsight, aimed at restoring vision in individuals who are blind, by the end of 2025.
Musk was asked by an audience member when he envisioned “solving blindness and bringing that to the masses.”
“Neuralink has had in monkeys a working device we call Blindsight,” Musk said. “It has been working well, and the monkeys are healthy for a few years now. ”
Blindsight, which received FDA breakthrough device designation in September of last year, is an implant that aims to restore vision in individuals who are blind.
Blindsight implants a microelectrode array into the visual cortex of a person’s brain. The array then activates neurons, which then provide the individual with a visual image.
“We’re hoping later this year to do our first device implant for humans, enabling someone who is completely blind to see,” Musk said.
He said he wanted to set expectations appropriately and explained that the individual’s vision would be low-resolution initially, “like Atari graphics.”
“It will start off very low-res, but then, overtime, I think, eventually the implant would enable vision that is like superhuman. So, that’ll be pretty cool,” Musk said.
THE LARGER TREND
Last year, Musk wrote on X that Blindsight will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see as long as their visual cortex is intact. It will even allow those blind from birth to see for the first time, he said.
The visual cortex is the part of one’s brain that receives and processes visual information from the retinas.
“Eventually, it has the potential [to] be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like [Star Trek’s character] Geordi La Forge,” Musk wrote.
Neuralink filed applications in early March with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to trademark the terms “Telepathy,” “Blindsight” and “Telekinesis.”
The applications pertain to Blindsight as well as Neuralink’s first product, Telepathy, a brain-computer interface that enables users to control devices with their thoughts, and Telekinesis, a term Musk has used interchangeably with Telepathy that relates to controlling devices using one’s mind.
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