Elon Musk's Neuralink used a brain implant to enable a monkey to see something that wasn't physically there, according to an engineer, as it moves toward its goal of helping blind people see. The device, called Blindsight, stimulated areas of a monkey's brain associated with vision, Neuralink engineer Joseph O'Doherty said Friday at a conference. At least two-thirds of the time, the monkey moved its eyes toward something researchers were trying to trick the brain into visualizing. The results were the first Neuralink has publicized about tests of Blindsight, a brain chip that mimics the function of an eye. This is a closely watched frontier for brain device development, a scientific field that's testing the boundaries of how technology can be used to potentially treat intractable conditions.

Elon Musk casually dropped that he has another Neuralink project in the works which he says will bestow sight upon people born blind -- and the tech is already being tested on monkeys. True to form, Musk announced the project's official name, 'Blindsight,' while replying to users on his social site X, first in late January, then with fresh details Wednesday. Musk claimed the tech will be lo-rez at first, 'like early Nintendo graphics' from the 1980s era of 8-bit video games. But ultimately, he hopes it will actually'exceed normal human vision.' If Blindsight remains true to its first unnamed tease, presented during a Neuralink'Show and Tell' in late 2022, the implant will be able to repackage digital camera data into electrical impulses compatible for delivery straight into the visual cortex.

Peter Watts is the author of some of the darkest and most thoroughly researched science fiction novels ever written. One of his early fans was horror author Theresa DeLucci, who read his debut novel Starfish while working at Tor Books in the early 2000s. "I had never really read a lot of hard science fiction, but his concepts really intrigued me, and the editor at the time told me that it was really, really dark, and he thought that I would like it, and he was absolutely correct," DeLucci says in Episode 551 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Watts is best known for his 2006 novel Blindsight, about a crew of augmented humans who are sent to intercept an alien vessel. Science fiction author Sam J. Miller says that Blindsight features some of the best-written aliens in all of science fiction.

One night in 1966, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Nicholas Humphrey was working in a darkened psychology lab at the University of Cambridge. An anesthetized monkey sat before him; glowing targets moved across a screen in front of the animal, and Humphrey, using an electrode, recorded the activity of nerve cells in its superior colliculus, an ancient brain area involved in visual processing. The superior colliculus predates the more advanced visual cortex, which enables conscious sight in mammals. Although the monkey was not awake, the cells in its superior colliculus were firing anyway, their activation registering as a series of crackles issuing from a loudspeaker. Humphrey seemed to be listening to the brain cells "seeing."

A seven-year-old boy who lost the visual processing center of his brain at two weeks old has shocked doctors by having normal sight. The unidentified Australian boy, known as BI, lost his visual cortex due to a rare metabolic disorder called medium-chain acyl-Co-A dehydrogenase deficiency. Now a report has revealed that BI is the first person ever to have normal sight without a visual cortex - he is able to play soccer, see colors and identify faces and only suffers nearsightedness. New tests showed that his brain rerouted itself to make up for sight, leading researchers to believe that newborn brains can recover and adapt much better than mature ones. An MRI shows a normal brain (left) and the seven-year-old Australian boy's brain that has been missing the visual cortex (right) since he was two weeks old The visual cortex is the part of the brain that receives and processes sensory nerve impulses from the eyes, ultimately giving you the ability to see.