An implant in the visual cortex gives sight with no working eyes

When the eyes and the optic nerves are gone, the only way to put a picture into a person is to stimulate the part of the brain that sees, at the back of the head. Electrodes there make a blind person see spots of light, and enough spots in the right places make a shape. The first person had this done in 1968; the first with a modern camera-driven grid, in 2018. None of it has left the laboratory, and the pictures are still a few dozen spots, not sight as a sighted person has it.

What would count

A person with no working eyes or optic nerves, fitted with electrodes on or in the visual part of the brain, reliably reports spots of light where the electrodes are driven and can use them to tell the position or shape of something in front of a camera, in a peer-reviewed report.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports of the implanted volunteers; a regulator's approval record if one comes

Where it stands

First human. Reached on 1 May 1968, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 5 to 20 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. The nearest item is older: Cortigent presented six-year results for the six Orion patients in January 2026 and says it is planning a larger trial with the FDA, with no date. Neuralink's Blindsight did not come up in either search. Nothing approaches the next rung, a regulator's approval.

Notes

The record is Brindley and Lewin's 1968 report of a blind woman with eighty radio-driven electrodes over her visual cortex, who saw spots of light where they were stimulated. Dobelle reported a camera-driven version in 2000, Second Sight implanted the first Orion device in 2018, and a Spanish group reported a blind woman recognising shapes and letters through a hundred-electrode array in 2021. All remain experimental; nothing is approved. The expected rung in the charter was first human and the record confirms it, only much earlier than the 2018 device the charter had in mind.