At the beginning of chapter 3, the text book says that in order to appreciate the complexity of the eye, you should try to build a bionic one. Obviously this would be an incredibly challenging thing to do, but how much more complicated would it be to design a bionic eye than a cochlear implant? Obviously I am thinking about these two devices in a conceptual way, as I have no engineering background and no idea of how complicated the mechanics of what I am talking about would be, but that being said, I an surprised that bionic eyes have not become as advanced or common as cochlear implants are.
The reason that I am surprised, is because I don’t see how the two would really be that different. Cochlear implants transform sound waves into electrical impulses, which the brain can interpret as noises. Why would a bionic eye be able to do the same for the energy waves that we interpret as light and color? A video camera is able to transform light entering the lens into electronic signals, that are able the be interpreted and either recorded to a tape, or projected onto the camera’s lcd screen. I do not see why a bionic eye would not be able to transmit the electrical signals that a video camera can produce via specifically placed electrodes to the vision centers of the brain. Obviously the visual system in a human being is incredibly complicated, and the science involved in actually placing the electrodes into the brain would be phenomenally complex, but after our study of the auditory system, I’m not convinced that the electrodes in cochlear implants are much less intricately placed. However, despite the seemingly similar conceptual aspects of bionic eyes and cochlear implants, cochlear implants seem to be far easier to make and implement into patients than bionic eyes are. What makes the electrode design and placement so much more difficult in the visual system that bionic eyes are years behind of the advances that have been made in cochlear implants? As we continue to study the brain systems involved in vision, I will be interested to see if there is anything about the location of these systems, or the mapping of theses brain areas that would make the placement of the electrodes so hard, it would account for the difficulty of construction of bionic eyes, or if it is something else about the device itself that makes them so much harder to make than cochlear implants.
Sunday, March 23
