Free Extinction by Mark Alpert Page B

hand and deftly caught it. “Not bad, eh? My ocular cameras and retinal implants give me enhanced motion-detection capabilities. Thanks to the new system, I can spot a curveball faster than Alex Rodriguez.”
    The murmurs grew louder. Arvin tossed the e-reader back to Robbie, who caught it with the mechanical arm and moved offstage. Then the old man reached into his pocket once again and pulled out a small piece of silvery foil about the size of a postage stamp. “The implant is a biocompatible sheath that lines the back of each eye. It’s imprinted with more than a million electrodes, which is a hundredfold increase over earlier models.” Using his pinky, Arvin pointed at a tiny computer chip attached to the foil. “But the real key to the implant’s success is this microprocessor. The ocular camera wirelessly transmits its video to this chip, which organizes and processes the visual information in the same way that a natural retina does. Then the electrodes feed the processed signals to the optic nerves that lead to the brain. In essence, the chip translates the camera video into neural code. For the first time ever, we can send a signal to the brain in the brain’s own language .”
    The audience was chattering wildly now. Jim could see why the venture capitalists were so excited. Arvin’s new implants weren’t just for the blind. They would also appeal to perfectly healthy people who wished to enhance their eyesight. Baseball players, say. Or sharpshooters.
    Arvin held out his hands, trying to quiet the crowd. “Before we get ahead of ourselves, I’m obliged to report the bad news. Obviously we’ll need to conduct clinical trials before the FDA approves these implants. But if Singularity attracts some new investors and raises enough money, we can complete the trials in less than a year.” He grinned confidently. Then his face turned sober. “And there’s another piece of bad news. Our implants won’t help everyone. They won’t work for people whose retinas have been completely lost, because they have no nerve cells to receive the signals. We’ve tried to help these patients by developing implants that send the video signals directly to the brain, but unfortunately those experiments have failed. Direct stimulus of the brain’s visual cortex can allow a blind person to perceive crude patterns, but it’s not even close to the kind of vision provided by the retinal implants.”
    The bad news didn’t seem to diminish the crowd’s enthusiasm. If anything, the chatter grew more feverish.
    “But one of the great truths of science is that even failures can teach us something,” Arvin continued. “During the course of our experiments with the brain implants, we learned a lot about the visual system. We discovered that after the visual cortex receives the signals from the optic nerve, it relays the information to other parts of the brain. And we found that one of these regions, the pulvinar nucleus, combines the visual signals with information from the other senses. This region is located deep inside the brain, on both sides of the structure called the thalamus. The pulvinar nucleus is about a centimeter wide and shaped like a cushion, so anatomists named it after the Latin word for cushion, pulvinus .”
    The venture capitalists started to get restless, shifting in their seats. They didn’t want to hear about the science. They wanted to hear more about superhuman vision. Because it was a freakin’ gold mine.
    “We focused our attention on the pulvinar nucleus because it seemed to be one of the places in the brain where perception takes place. Where the most important information from the visual field is sent after it’s been deciphered by the cortex. Using implanted arrays of electrodes, we tried to deliver a visual signal to this part of the brain, and as I said, we failed. But as we did our experiments, an amazing thing happened. Although we couldn’t deliver a visual signal directly to the brain, we