Free Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler Page B

installed in humans. But due diligence is due diligence, so I got on a plane.
Staggering doesn’t come close to describing what I found when I landed. Day one: I met a blind man. Day three: He could see well enough to drive a car around a crowded parking lot.
According to the World Health Organization, there are 285 million visually impaired people on the planet — most of whom can be helped by this kind of innovation. But the crazier part is what comes next. Dobelle built an implant that restores normal vision, but devices capable ofaugmented sight — eagle eyes or eyes that see colors outside of our visual spectrum or eyes that have microscopic abilities — are not far behind. We are arguably less than a decade away from talents lifted straight from the pages of comic books. No, staggering doesn’t even come close.

1.
    I’m sitting across from a blind man — call him Patient Alpha — at a long table in a windowless conference room in New York. On one end of the table there’s an old television and a VCR. On the other end are a couple of laptops. They’re connected by wires to a pair of homemade signal processors housed in unadorned gunmetal gray boxes, each no bigger than a loaf of bread. In the corner stands a plastic ficus tree, and beyond that, against the far wall, a crowded bookshelf. Otherwise, the walls are white and bare. And when the world’s first bionic eye is turned on, this is what Patient Alpha will see.
    Our guinea pig is thirty-nine, strong and tall, with an angular jaw, large ears, and a rugged face. He looks hale, hearty, and healthy — except for the wires. They run from the laptops into the signal processors, then out again and across the table and up into the air, flanking his face like curtains before disappearing into holes drilled through his skull. Since his hair is dark and the wires are black, it’s hard to see the actual points of entry. From a distance the wires look like long ponytails.
    “Come on,” says William Dobelle. “Take a good look.”
    From a few steps closer, I see that the wires plug into Patient Alpha’s head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel.
    “It’s called a percutaneous pedestal,” Dobelle tells me.
    All I can do is stare. This man has computer jacks sunk into both sides of his skull.
    On the far side of the pedestal, buried beneath hair and skin, is the wetware: a pair of brain implants. Each one is the size of a fat quarter, a platinum electrode array encased in biocompatible plastic.
    Dobelle has designed a three-part system: a miniature video camera, a signal processor, and the brain implants. The camera, mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, captures the scene in front of the wearer. The processor translates the image into a series of signals that the brain can understand, then sends the information to the implant. The picture is fed into the brain, and, if everything goes according to plan, the brain will “see” the image.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. The camera’s not here yet. Right now the laptops are taking its place. Two computer techs are using them to calibrate the implants.
    One of the techs punches a button, and a millisecond later the patient rotates his head, right to left, as if surveying a crowded room.
    “What do you see?” asks Dobelle.
    “A medium-size phosphene, about five inches from my face,” responds the patient.
    “How about now?”
    “That one’s too bright.”
    “OK,” says Dobelle. “We won’t use that one again.”
    This goes on all morning, and it’s nothing new. For almost fifty years, scientists have known that electrical stimulation of the visual cortex causes blind subjects to perceive small points of light known as phosphenes. The tests they’re running aim to determine the “map” of the patient’s phosphenes. When