(free subscription required) One of the last new argonauts: A review of the #Argus II artificial retinal implant, by Ross A. Doerr https://www.toptechtidbits.com/138.html PDF at https://www.toptechtidbits.com/documents/ARGUS-II-Artificial-Retinal-Implant-Review-By-Ross-A-Doerr.pdf #retinal #implant, #visual #prosthesis; #NeuroTech #neuroscience
@seeingwithsound Thanks for sharing this interesting story. It's a bit sad that the Argus II implant patients are now on their own.
The mentioned "side-effects" are interesting in terms of neuroscience. I can sort of see how there could be "sharpening" of the residual visual field, which I think may be due to driving feedforward inhibition. But I'm not quite sure what to make of the tingling ear sensation. There was a recent study that suggested that eye movements can cause eardrums to move (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1717948115), but not clear if that'll be related?
Anyway, I do learn a lot from your posts. Thanks 
@hkl I do not know of eye-ear interactions other than by analogy either, such as the reference that you gave, or attention related mechanisms https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202414 Very intriguing is also the changes reported for the non-implanted eye. My guess is that the surgery and/or stimulation of the right eye releases biochemicals that diffuse all the way via the optic chiasm to the left eye. It strongly reminds me of similar effects reported with gene therapy for eye diseases https://www.newscientist.com/article/2262327-gene-therapy-injected-in-one-eye-can-travel-to-the-other-eye/
@hkl Also reminiscent of old reports about Optobionics where vision improvements were better than could be explained from the implant's functionality and might be attributed to wound healing related release of biochemicals https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15078662/
@seeingwithsound It could be biochemicals... or it could be that re-activated cortical area may cross-talk with other areas. Most brain areas are interconnected, so that's also a possibility. It would be very interesting to see if these things could be tested at a mechanistic level.
