I thought the recent story of the man who had some return of vision (after ~40 years of blindness) following corneal stem cell transplant was fascinating, especially WRT how the brain requires experience/input to develop certain abilities correctly:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/Healthology/HS_seeingagain_030827.html "...A chemical accident left him completely blind at the age of 3. In 2000, 43 years after May lost his sight, he had an experimental limbal stem cell transplant in his right eye that restored his vision. "The procedure is a rare one, performed in perhaps 100 people each year in the United States and is not related to retina or optic nerve transplantation. "Now that May, a California businessman, can see, he has found sight is not that simple. His world consists of abstract shapes and colors, but not three-dimensional shapes. He can't identify his wife from her face alone, nor can he tell the difference between male and female faces most of the time. Facial expressions remain a mystery... "...Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, revealed the parts of May's brain normally responsible for processing faces and objects were inactive. When he was shown something moving, however, that part of his brain showed high levels of activity. ""The parts of the brain that were connected to the motion-processing areas were fine, but the information that was being sent to areas that process objects and faces wasn't lighting up at all," says study author Ione Fine, who led the project while she was a research scientist at the University of California at San Diego. "It's very much a wiring thing. He can see. He can't make sense of it." "Because he had blinded so early in life, May's brain never had the chance to "learn" how to see. "Infants just out of the womb see poorly," says Dr. Ivan Schwab, professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, Davis and a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. "The brain has to put it together and the early years are very important..." The SciAmer article is short: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007C81F-8540-1F46-B0B980A841890000 Here is a NEJM abstract of one study: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/340/22/1697 And this might be the 'ancestor' of Geordie LaForge's artificial eyes [I forget which NextGen movie]: http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/gma/goodmorningamerica/gma020508artificialretina.html "...The brothers invented a wafer-thin array of photocells that are surgically placed beneath the patient's defective retina. Only six patients have braved the historic surgery � and so far the results have been promising. Chow said the study was conducted to determine whether the device is safe..." Debbi Jeepers Creepers Maru ;) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
