Dr. David Eagleman

So if I'm looking at the coffee cup in front of me, I'm feeling the outline of the coffee cup.

And blind people can get so good at this.

They can do things like, you know, throw a ball into a basket or navigate a complex obstacle course.

Whoa.

It sounds crazy.

But the thing to remember is the way you normally see is your eyeballs are, you know, these devices embedded in your skull here that are capturing photons and turning that into spikes.

that race into the darkness of your brain.

Electrical signals.

Electrical signals, exactly.

And so this is just turning what your tongue is feeling into spikes, these electrical signals that race into the darkness of your brain.

And you can figure it out.

You can learn how to see that way.

And again, it's with correlation because you feel something with your fingers.

Maybe you hear something also.

And so you're putting that together and your brain says, oh, okay, I got it.

There's a visual thing out there in the world.

And the really wacky part I'll just mention is that people using the brain port who, let's say, used to have sight and lost it, they will report it is like sight.

They say, I remember seeing, and this is like seeing, even though it's coming through their tongue.

And with the neosensory wristband that we built, you know, I interviewed a guy after he'd been wearing it about six months, and I said, look, when you hear a dog bark, do you feel the buzzing on your wrist?

And then you think, okay, that must be a dog bark.