[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] Mixed Feelings - Wicab, neuroplasticity ...

[Lisa Yayla]

****Hi,

Excerpt from Wired article thought would be of interest.
Best,
Lisa

link
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp_pr.html
excerpt
See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your 
pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain 
to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones.

....Later, in the '60s and '70s, Harvard neuro biologists David Hubel 
and Torsten Wiesel figured out that visual input at a certain critical 
age helps animals develop a functioning visual cortex (the pair shared a 
1981 Nobel Prize for their work). But it wasn't until the late '90s that 
researchers realized the adult brain was just as changeable, that it 
could redeploy neurons by forming new synapses, remapping itself. That 
property is called neuroplasticity.

This is really good news for people building sensory prosthetics, 
because it means that the brain can change how it interprets information 
from a particular sense, or take information from one sense and 
interpret it with another. In other words, you can use whatever sensor 
you want, as long as you convert the data it collects into a form the 
human brain can absorb.

*Paul Bach-y-Rita* built his first "tactile display" in the 1960s. 
Inspired by the plasticity he saw in his father as the older man 
recovered from a stroke, Bach-y-Rita wanted to prove that the brain 
could assimilate disparate types of information. So he installed a 
20-by-20 array of metal rods in the back of an old dentist chair. The 
ends of the rods were the pixels — people sitting in the chairs could 
identify, with great accuracy, "pictures" poked into their backs; they 
could, in effect, see the images with their sense of touch.

By the 1980s, Bach-y-Rita's team of neuroscientists — now located at the 
University of Wisconsin — were working on a much more sophisticated 
version of the chair. Bach-y-Rita died last November, but his lab and 
the company he cofounded, Wicab, are still using touch to carry new 
sensory information. Having long ago abandoned the vaguely /Marathon 
Man/ like dentist chair, the team now uses a mouthpiece studded with 144 
tiny electrodes. It's attached by ribbon cable to a pulse generator that 
induces electric current against the tongue. (As a sensing organ, the 
tongue has a lot going for it: nerves and touch receptors packed close 
together and bathed in a conducting liquid, saliva.)

So what kind of information could they pipe in? Mitch Tyler, one of 
Bach-y-Rita's closest research colleagues, literally stumbled upon the 
answer in 2000, when he got an inner ear infection. If you've had one of 
these (or a hangover), you know the feeling: Tyler's world was spinning. 
His semicircular canals — where the inner ear senses orientation in 
space — weren't working. "It was hell," he says. "I could stay upright 
only by fixating on distant objects." Struggling into work one day, he 
realized that the tongue display might be able to help.

The team attached an accelerometer to the pulse generator, which they 
programmed to produce a tiny square. Stay upright and you feel the 
square in the center of your tongue; move to the right or left and the 
square moves in that direction, too. In this setup, the accelerometer is 
the sensor and the combination of mouthpiece and tongue is the 
transducer, the doorway into the brain.

The researchers started testing the device on people with damaged inner 
ears. Not only did it restore their balance (presumably by giving them a 
data feed that was cleaner than the one coming from their semi circular 
canals) but the effects lasted even after they'd removed the mouthpiece 
— sometimes for hours or days.

The success of that balance therapy, now in clinical trials, led Wicab 
researchers to start thinking about other kinds of data they could pipe 
to the mouthpiece. During a long brainstorm session, they wondered 
whether the tongue could actually augment sight for the visually 
impaired. I tried the prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with 
spare electronics parts, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a 
plastic box the size of a brick around my neck and gave me the 
mouthpiece. "Some people hold it still, and some keep it moving like a 
lollipop," she said. "It's up to you."

Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny camera 
attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would 
relay images to the mouthpiece. The look was pretty geeky, but the folks 
at the lab were used to it.

She turned it on. Nothing happened.

"Those buttons on the box?" she said. "They're like the volume controls 
for the image. You want to turn it up as high as you're comfortable."

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn't 
feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt 
battery. Arnoldussen handed me a long white foam cylinder and spun my 
chair toward a large black rectangle painted on the wall. "Move the foam 
against the black to see how it feels," she said.

I could see it. Feel it. Whatever — I could tell where the foam was. 
With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the 
Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head 
from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like 
radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the 
electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are 
pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as 
though I'd seen them with my eyes. Tyler's group hasn't done the brain 
imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don't know whether 
my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or 
whether some other region was doing the work.

I later tried another version of the technology meant for divers. It 
displayed a set of directional glyphs on my tongue intended to tell them 
which way to swim. A flashing triangle on the right would mean "turn 
right," vertical bars moving right says "float right but keep going 
straight," and so on. At the University of Wisconsin lab, Tyler set me 
up with the prototype, a joystick, and a computer screen depicting a 
rudimentary maze. After a minute of bumping against the virtual walls, I 
asked Tyler to hide the maze window, closed my eyes, and successfully 
navigated two courses in 15 minutes. It was like I had something in my 
head magically telling me which way to go.