Bionic eye Tech Teaches his ABCs
News Highlights: Bionic eye Tech Teaches his ABCs
Jens Naumann was 17 when an accident flew a piece of metal off a railroad into his left eye. Three years later, a metal strip from a snowmobile clutch destroyed his right eye, plunging him into total darkness. Naumann’s book Search for Paradise tells of his desperate quest back to the light, primarily as the ‘patient alpha’ of biomedical engineer William Dobelle. In the 1970s, Dobelle had shown that electrically stimulating visual areas of the brain (the visual cortex) caused people to perceive spots of light, or ‘phosphenes’.