Plastic Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution

Abstract

In recent years considerable success has been achieved in the development and utilization of apparatus designed to provide the blind with a substitute visual input. Several groups of investigators have used the skin to relay the output of a camera to the central nervous system, one of the best known results being the Bliss-Linvill Optacon, to enable the blind to read printed matter (7). Our own endeavors at the Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Sciences have been directed toward development of a tactile vision substitution system (TVSS) to present pictorial information to the blind (3, 4, 5, 12, 30). Briefly, with the TVSS, optical images picked up through a television camera are presented as a two-dimensional pattern of pulses to a mosaic of stimulators arranged on the skin of the trunk. Information of the patterned stimuli is then transmitted via the ascending somatosensory system to cortical areas for analysis and interpretation. Several factors indicate that the pictorial information can be interpreted as “visual”.