Visions, not blindness

I came across this link today

Eye Implant That Restores Vision to the Blind Cleared for Sale Futurism

 ...and was reminded of a story from the Phenomenology of Perception (pdf). 

Something like this has occurred before. People born with congenital cataracts, a hardware problem, were promised vision after the cataract operation was discovered.

But after the hardware problem was solved, the surgeons discovered an underlying sofware problem: The patients without a hardware impediment to light reaching their retinas didn't know what to do with it once it arrived. They literally could not distinguish between a circle and a square on a plain background.

The intrepid surgeons discovered they needed to train their patients to use their gaze as they had previously used their touch to perceive the different outlines of figures. This tedious process meant that patients had to painstakingly construct a "vocabulary" of sight--edges, corners, depth, etc. This is what those infants are doing as they crawl around, touching everything, putting things in their mouths and so on. 

I've read that the patients receiving the cataract surgery to cure their hardware issue often found constructing that "vocabulary" so difficult that they went back to living as blind people. 

In any case, it will be interesting to see the kind of training required for an eye implant. It may surprise the hardware guys to find software is necessary.