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A magnetic brain implant lets blind rats see without seeing

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A new brain implant doesn’t restore sight in blind rats, but it does something a whole lot weirder: give the rat the extra sense of geomagnetism. It could one day be a new way to navigate for blind people–or heck, even healthy people hankering for a sixth sense.

In the study published in Current Biology, scientists in Japan put a chip that could sense north and south inside the brains of rats. The rats also got two electrodes implanted in the visual cortex of the brains. If its head faced roughly north, the electrodes stimulated the right visual cortex. If south, then the left visual cortex.

Essentially, the rat can “see” which direction it’s facing without really, erh, seeing anything through its eyes. It was probably disorientating at first, but after two days and 60 trials, the blind rats could navigate a maze just as well as rats with sight. With the implants removed, they were lost again.
via Gizmodo

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