UW debunks Elon Musk’s claim that brain implant will ‘exceed normal human vision’
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – A study from the University of Washington found Elon Musk’s claim that his Blindsight brain implant project could “exceed normal human vision,” is unlikely, and instead could create blurry vision.
The study comes after a March post on X — formerly Twitter — by Musk, in which he described the capabilities of Blindsight, which aims to restore vision. In the post, Musk claimed Blindsight “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”
However, “that pronouncement is unrealistic at best,” according to UW researchers.
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Ione Fine, a UW psychology professor and the lead author of the study, said Musk’s projection for the latest Neuralink project is based on a “flawed premise” that implanting millions of tiny electrodes into the visual cortex – the part of the brain the processes information received from the eye – will give people high-resolution vision.
During the study, researchers created a computer model that simulates the experience of a range of human cortical studies, including a high-resolution implant such as Blindsight.
One simulation found that a movie of a cat with a resolution of 45,000 pixels is “crystal-clear,” however, a movie simulating the vision of a patient with 45,000 electrodes implanted in the visual cortex would perceive the cat as “blurry and barely recognizable,” according to the researchers.
Fine said that’s because a single electrode does not represent a pixel and instead stimulates a single neuron at best.
“On a computer screen, pixels are tiny ‘dots.’ But that’s not the case in the visual cortex. Instead, each neuron tells the brain about images within a small region of space called the ‘receptive field,’ and the receptive fields of neurons overlap,” UW explained. “This means that a single spot of light stimulates a complex pool of neurons. Image sharpness is determined not by the size or number of individual electrodes, but the way information is represented by thousands of neurons in the brain.”
“Engineers often think of electrodes as producing pixels,” Fine said, “but that is simply not how biology works. We hope that our simulations based on a simple model of the visual system can give insight into how these implants are going to perform. These simulations are very different from the intuition an engineer might have if they are thinking in terms of a pixels on a computer screen.”
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Researchers used a range of animal and human data to create the computer models that show for the first time how human electrical simulation in the visual cortex could be experienced, UW said.
Fine noted that Musk is making strides in the engineering aspects of visual implants but said one challenge remains.
“Once the electrodes are implanted and stimulating single cells, you still need to recreate a neural code — a complex pattern of firing over many thousands of cells — that creates good vision,” UW said.
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“Even to get to typical human vision, you would not only have to align an electrode to each cell in the visual cortex, but you’d also have to stimulate it with the appropriate code,” Fine said. “That is incredibly complicated because each individual cell has its own code. You can’t stimulate 44,000 cells in a blind person and say, ‘Draw what you see when I stimulate this cell.’ It would literally take years to map out every single cell.”
Fine noted that at this point, scientists do not know how to find the correct neural code for people who are blind.
“Somebody might one day have a conceptual breakthrough that gives us that Rosetta Stone,” Fine said. “It’s also possible that there can be some plasticity where people can learn to make better use of an incorrect code. But my own research and that of others shows that there’s currently no evidence that people have massive abilities to adapt to an incorrect code.”
Researchers said without developing that code, the vision provided by projects such as Blindsight will be fuzzy and imperfect.
“Many people become blind late in life,” Fine said. “When you’re 70 years old, learning the new skills required to thrive as a blind individual is very difficult. There are high rates of depression. There can be desperation to regain sight. Blindness doesn’t make people vulnerable, but becoming blind late in life can make some people vulnerable. So, when Elon Musk says things like, ‘This is going to better than human vision,’ that is a dangerous thing to say.”
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