I’d been testing the BrainPort for a number of years and even had the privilege of meeting Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, the pioneer responsible for this groundbreaking concept. In 2003, my dad had read an article in a science magazine about Dr. Bach-y-Rita’s work, and he reached out to see whether I might be a good candidate to help test the device. A few months later, I met Dr. Bach-y-Rita at the Tactile Communication and Neurorehabilitation Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“The brain has the capacity to change,” Dr. Bach-y-Rita stated. “If one part, or a number of parts, fail, then other parts can adapt and take over. This is called neuroplasticity.

“It’s the brain that sees, not the eyes,” Dr. Bach-y-Rita said. “If one sense, such as vision, is damaged, we wondered if another sense could take over. Our theory was that we could find another portal to send input to the brain. We called this ‘sensory substitution.’”

Earlier in his study, before I had met him, Bach-y-Rita had rigged a dentist’s chair with panels holding four hundred small touch sensors that were connected to a camera. What the camera saw was translated to electrical signals that vibrated the chair’s sensors. When blind subjects sat in the chair, they were able to translate the vibrating patterns they were feeling on their backs into triangles and squares, letters, and then words.

“When you were a child,” the doctor asked excitedly when he described this to me, “did anyone draw on your back? Well, that’s what was happening. These subjects were reading with their skin.”

Eventually, they were able to detect furniture, telephones, even faces. The visual cortex in the brain was designed to receive information through the eyes, but Dr. Bach-y-Rita had discovered that another sense, the sense of touch, could substitute. He had created a new connection, one that was thought to be broken permanently, showing that the brain could change and adapt to new sensory input.

The BrainPort device I was testing had come a long way from a dentist’s chair, but the concept was essentially the same, except now, I would feel the vibrations on my tongue. Dr. Bach-y-Rita discovered the tongue is excellent for sensory stimulation. Its many receptors make it very sensitive, and because it’s coated with saliva, it takes well to electrical contact. In normal vision, light hitting the retina provokes electric impulses that the brain translates into images. What the BrainPort does is convert light into electrical impulses that stimulate the tongue instead of the retina.