Weekend of Science!

With a delagation from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience we participated again in this year’s edition of the national ‘Weekend of Science’ (4 - 5 October). A short reminder: during this weekend universities and research institutes across the country aim to demonstrate their work and inspire neuroscientists in the making.

This year, we were asked to run some cool experiments at the NEMO Studio, next to the NEMO museum and talk about what we understand (and do not yet understand) about the brain.

Within our research group we are working on an intracortical visual prosthesis: a device that uses electrical currents directly applied to the brain to create an image that the brain can process. These electrical currents create so-called ‘phosphenes’, whitish dots that appear in your visual field, depending on where exactly you stimulate. Our ultimate goal is to build a visual prosthesis that will let blind people regain some from of vision.

We also simulate what these blind people will perceive with a visual prosthesis Through VR glasses we can let people experience what it would be like to have phosphene-vision. Which is exactly what we showed the kids (and some of the parents), who were able to navigate surprisingly well in this landscape of phosphene dots!