Seeing with tongue

[Athena]

What is vision? is seeing with the tongue vision? The Public Broadcasting Station has aired a show about blind people being able to see by using a devise that enables them to see with their tongue.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010901/bob14.asp The Seeing Tongue In-the-mouth electrodes give blind people a feel for vision Peter Weiss Blind since birth, Marie-Laure Martin had always thought that candle flames were big balls of fire. The 39-year-old woman couldn't see the flames themselves, but she could sense the candle's aura of heat. At the end of a flexible cable pressed against the tongue, an array of dotlike metal electrodes (below) stimulates touch-sensitive nerves with electric pulses. Patterns of pulses represent images from a video camera (not shown). J. Miller Last October, she saw a candle flame for the first time. She was stunned by how small it actually was and how it danced. There's a second marvel here: She saw it all with her tongue. The tongue, an organ of taste and touch, may seem like an unlikely substitute for the eyes. After all, it's usually hidden inside the mouth, insensitive to light, and not connected to optic nerves. However, a growing body of research indicates that the tongue may in fact be the second-best place on the body for receiving visual information from the world and transmitting it to the brain. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin­Madison are developing this tongue-stimulating system, which translates images detected by a camera into a pattern of electric pulses that trigger touch receptors. The scientists say that volunteers testing the prototype soon lose awareness of on-the-tongue sensations. They then perceive the stimulation as shapes and features in space. Their tongue becomes a surrogate eye.