New at Insight
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Images on the tip of your Tongue!Created:June 19, 2004Professor Maurice Ptito, a neuropsychologist at the Université de Montréal, together with colleagues in Denmark and the United States, has developed a system to allow the blind to “see with their tongue”. The Tongue Display Unit (TDU) is a hands-free and noninvasive system that uses a 144-pixel device to stimulate areas of the brain that are normally reserved for visual information and are unused when someone suffers from congenital blindness. Scan-recorded electrical activity has shown that in people who were born blind, the cerebral cortex, which is normally used for vision, is reactivated by this device.Professor Ptito chose the tongue because information processing from this organ occupies a large part of the brain and the presence of saliva creates excellent conditions for electrical stimulus transmission. This research, initiated in Scandinavia and continuing in Canada, has now begun on congenitally blind individuals from the Nazareth and Louis Braille Institute, which is in the same building as the Université de Montréal School of Optometry. In the short term, the TDU could potentially replace the Braille alphabet. Possible applications of this system, however, could involve a miniaturized system that would transmit images as well. To do so, a camera installed in the eye would transmit an image to a device worn on the belt, which would then send an electrical stimulus to the lingual stimulator mounted under the palate. The wearer would then use his or her tongue to see what the rest of us can see with our eyes. |