Writing for The New Yorker, Patrick House examines Professor Pawan Sinha’s work with sight restoration. “A remarkable thing about the brain’s processing capabilities is that, even with less than perfect image quality, it can extract a great deal of meaning about the visual world,” says Sinha of the benefits of sight restoration surgery.
Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post writes about a new study conducted by researchers from MIT and Johns Hopkins University that showed that sightless people, “understand how others see the world in the same way that sighted people do — though they have never personally experienced a single visual image.”
Associated Press reporter Rodrique Ngowi writes about how researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a prototype of an audio reading device for the blind. The device, which is in the early stages of development, is produced by a 3-D printer and is equipped with a small camera that scans text.
NPR’s Joe Palca reports on EyeWire, a computer game developed by MIT researchers to help map nerve connections in the eye. Palca reports that over “120,000 citizen neuroscientists from 140 countries” played the game, helping to produce a map that shows that the eye’s retina detects motion.
Guardian reporter Meeri Kim highlights new MIT research that shows that in order to manage the world’s visual chaos, the human brain performs automatic visual smoothing over time and our visual perception is influenced by what we saw up to 15 seconds ago.
Washington Post reporter Meeri Kim writes about a new MIT study that shows the human brain performs automatic visual smoothing when processing information. In particular, researchers found that our visual perception is influenced by what we saw up to 15 seconds ago.