How a brain prosthesis could help the blind | Pieter Roelfsema & Hein Noortman | TEDxDenHelder

Hein Noortman was training for a frozen waterfall winterclimb in the Alps. In a climbinghall in Rotterdam it went wrong. He fel down from a height of 15 metres and landed on his face on a concrete floor. He damaged the nerves that transport the visual information from the eye to the brain and now lives in total darkness.

Pieter Roelfsema is an expert in how vision works in the brain. He demonstrated how it is possible to directly convey information to the parts of the brain of people whose eyes stopped working. The idea is to take the information of a camera that the blind person wears and to directly plug it into the visual cortex. Pieter Roelfsema is director of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam and professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and at the AUMC in Amsterdam. He was trained as medical doctor but works as scientist aiming to understand how the information that enters our eye is transformed into meaning. He develops the neurotechnology for high-bandwidth visual prostheses for blind people, aiming to restore a rudimentary form of sight.

Hein Noortman is an entrepreneur, business advisor and speaker. He inspires people on themes as resilience leadership and safety leadership. He is also ambassador for the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and started a fundraising; check www.laatblindenweerzien.nl to find out more or do the blind city experience on www.theblindexperience.nl This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx