Word: brains
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Stimulated Sight. Scientists have long known that the eyes and the ears are not the actual instruments of sight and hearing, but highly selective transmission stations which pick up light and sound waves, translate them into electrical impulses, and carry them to the visual and auditory areas of the brain. In the brain, the impulses are finally translated into the sensations that are recognized as anything from a Grandma Moses painting to the radio-chant of the tobacco auctioneer. Most blindness or deafness and many kinds of paralysis are caused by the failure of the transmission station-the eyes...
Krieg's research indicates that even when the transmission stations are permanently damaged, the brain is still capable of receiving and translating electrical impulses artificially applied. Thus, Krieg says, if a certain point at the back of the brain is stimulated, the patient will "see" a flash of light in a precise part of his visual field...
Switchboard Movement. What Krieg cautiously proposes is a lengthy inquiry into the possibility of building substitute transmission stations, i.e., electrical apparatuses which would be worn, perhaps, on the head, through which controlled and meaningful signals could be sent electrically to the brain of a blinded man. A group of electrical contacts touching the surface of the subject's brain, says Dr. Krieg, might enable him to read. A pattern of such impulses coming through the electrodes of the apparatus might be controlled to appear as words, moving across the blind man's visual consciousness like the letters...
Before any real and lasting benefits for humans can be realized in this field, Krieg warns, man must first enlarge the horizons of his knowledge of the brain itself, until he knows exactly what part each tiny area plays in motor activity or sensory perception. After that, some of the great possibilities might become a reality for the lame, the deaf and the blind...
...similar studies on stimulation of the parts of the brain controlling the functions of internal organs, Dr. Walter Rudolph Hess (TIME, Nov. 7) received this year's Nobel Prize in medicine...