Pieter Roelfsema | “Toward visual brain prostheses: restoring sight through cortical and thalamic stimulation”

Emerging techniques | Manfred Eigen lecture theatre

Our goal is to restore vision by directly stimulating the visual brain, bypassing damaged eyes of blind individuals. Electrical stimulation of visual cortex can evoke phosphenes, even in patients blind for decades. Using arrays of 1,000 electrodes, we demonstrated that patterned stimulation can generate recognizable visual forms. However, cortical implants face limitations in their longevity and visual field coverage. To address these challenges, we are developing a flexible “fountain probe” enabling large-scale stimulation of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), offering improved durability and broader visual field access.

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