Restoring sight in blind people is the focus of countless research teams around the world. There are technologies already available, such as recently approved Alpha IMS Retinal Implant, that bring limited vision to those with dysfunctional retinas. There’s also promising work being done utilizing stem cells, and new surgical tools are coming out that open new therapeutic possibilities. Yet, one avenue that’s not been fully investigated is how to utilize the brain’s own capacity to change the role of what our senses can do for us. There’s evidence that regions of the brain responsible for a lost sense, such as vision when going blind, can begin working in cooperation with another sense, in this case hearing, to boost the cognitive abilities of the properly functioning sense.
Researchers from The Netherlands and U.K. have been researching a system called “The vOICe” that transforms what a head-mounted camera sees into an audio soundscape that even people with little training are able to use fairly effectively. The group has published an article in Frontiers in Cognitive Science arguing that sensory substitution has the potential to compete with other vision restoring technologies, particularly because there are no surgeries, implants, or anything else besides putting on a pair of headphones hooked up to a camera.
From the article:
Here we utilized sensory substitution to examine how the very first stages of learning to “see with sound” occurs, and the quality of the information transfer from vision to audition as assessed with a test of acuity. A more complete understanding of the way in which this occurs may assist in the development of such devices that not only replicate lost sensory functionality, particularly in the blind, but along with research on synesthesia and multisensory processing, also call into question our notion of sensory modalities as functionally discrete, non-overlapping entities.
Full article in Frontiers in Cognitive Science: How well do you see what you hear? The acuity of visual-to-auditory sensory substitution
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