Elon Musk’s brain implant’s promise of superhuman vision is called into question by a US study

An excessive ambition? An American scientific study, published on Monday July 30, calls into question Elon Musk’s recent claims that a brain implant from his start-up Neuralink could restore sight to blind people or even give them superhuman vision.

The billionaire had claimed in March on his social network X that Neuralink’s next project, called “Blindsight”, could restore the sight of blind people, even from birth, assuring that this brain implant already worked on monkeys. “The resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but may eventually exceed normal human vision.”added the boss of Tesla and SpaceX.

But Elon Musk’s project is based on the principle “wrong” that implanting millions of tiny electrodes in the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information will result in high-resolution vision, explained in a statement Ione Fine, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and co-author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, which challenges Elon Musk’s claims.

The researchers created a computer model, a sort of virtual patient, from data from animals and humans to study what the experience would be like with a brain implant of the “Blindsight” type.Engineers often think that electrodes produce pixels but that’s not how biology works”Fine explained. According to her, scientists are still far from knowing how to create the neural code needed to restore sight to a blind person, which means that the results obtained by Elon Musk’s implant would be limited.