3. Light in the Tunnel: Towards Partial Remedy to Blindness

In this episode, Paweł Świeboda talks to Dr Pieter Roelfsema, the scientist who is on a mission to offer blind people an opportunity to regain rudimentary vision. Peter is Director of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and leader of its Vision and Cognition Group. He is also professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. Pieter was trained in medicine but found vocation in fundamental science, when his father gave him a book about the holy grail of neuroscience, the problem of consciousness, by Douglas Hofstadter. He works on understanding cortical mechanisms of visual perception, memory and plasticity. This has led Pieter to develop an approach to overcome visual impairment in people with a history of vision. The conversation covers methods of developing high-bandwidth visual prosthesis for the blind; significance of rudimentary vision; new methods of stimulation, including optogenetics and neurostimulation via nanoparticles; ways of probing the brain; interdisciplinarity of neurotechnology, its prospects and ways of policy to support it; and finally ethical considerations. #neurocentury #neurotechnology #neuroscience #blindness #neurostimulation #brain ________________ neurocentury.com Music for the NeuroCentury podcast is composed by Rafał Kulczycki