Sheila Nirenberg: A prosthetic eye to treat blindness

At TEDMED, Sheila Nirenberg shows a bold way to create sight in people with certain kinds of blindness: by hooking into the optic nerve and sending signals from a camera direct to the brain.

Sheila Nirenberg
Sheila Nirenberg studies how the brain encodes information -- possibly allowing us to decode it, and maybe develop prosthetic sensory devices.


Why you should listen to her:

Sheila Nirenberg is a neuroscientist/professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where she studies neural coding – that is, how the brain takes information from the outside world and encodes it in patterns of electrical activity. The idea is to be able to decode the activity, to look at a pattern of electrical pulses and know what an animal is seeing or thinking or feeling. Recently, she’s been using this work to develop new kinds of prosthetic devices, particularly ones for treating blindness.