Dr. David Eagleman

How?

Because it's doing correlations.

It sees somebody's mouth move, it's feeling the sound, and it figures out how to hear that way.

Now, this idea of sensory substitution,

I, you know, I wish I'd invented that, but it actually has a long history.

And the more I research, I found out it goes back to the 1800s when people first started asking, hey, can you push information into the brain in a weird way?

So the very first one was in 1880s.

They had a little camera lens that would just detect light and dark and it would get translated into a buzzing on your forehead.

And for people who were blind, they could tell, you know, okay, well, there's a wall over here and then there's an opening over here and so on.

And then people worked on this.

The first major paper was in 1969 in Nature.

A guy named Paul Bakirida took blind people and he put them in a dental chair.

And he had this thing that would poke them in the back, a grid of 40 by 40 little solenoids that would poke in the back.

And he set up a video camera.

Whatever the camera saw, you would feel that in your back.

So if it's looking at a triangle, you feel that triangle poked in your back.

If it's looking at a face, you feel the face.

So...

Blind people got pretty good at doing this, especially once he let them control the camera so they could move the camera any way they wanted.

People got really good at being able to tell what was going on.