Researchers are the University of Wisconsin have developed what is surely the weirdest visual aid ever: A device that lets the blind see — by using their tongues. As a story in The Science News reports:

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. …

“You don’t see with the eyes. You see with the brain,” contends [Wisconsin neuroscientist and physician Paul Bach-y-Rita]. An image, once it reaches an eye’s retina, “becomes nerve pulses no different from those from the big toe,” he says.

People who’ve tried it out — including sighted people who wear blindfolds — describe the tongue sensations as “tingling or bubbling”. The only problem right now is that the tongue sensor can only output signals with three levels of gradation; the eye can perceive regions that are 1,000 times brighter than the dimmest ones. And the grid that lays on your tongue is only 12 pixels by 12 pixels — pretty low resolution. But, if you’re blind, better than nothing.

There’s some sort of joke/pun to be made here using the phrase “I’d give my eye teeth”, but I can’t figure out what it is.

(Thanks to Matthew’s SelfUnfocused for this one!)