[ACTOR: Lesson number four. Imagine a lot of Coca-Cola-like bubbles on your tongue. (Repeated in another language.) Now you try. Pretty good!]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Emilie.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My name is Emilie Gossiaux and I'm an artist.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: State your name. Emilie.]

JAD: Some of you may remember that a couple years ago we did a story about Emilie where she had been hit by a truck, gone into a coma and then her boyfriend at the time, Alan, had brought her back by writing on her hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: She's writing her name on the palm of my hand.]

JAD: Of all the stories we've ever done, I think this one has gotten the most response. And when we left that story, Emilie had emerged from the coma and begun to recover. But she was blind.

JAD: Totally blind, right?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah.

JAD: Like, no light. Nothing coming in.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: Needless to say, it was a very big adjustment.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I just know—I just had to develop my own ways to navigate throughout the world and trust myself and ...

JAD: And being a visual artist, she had to develop new ways to draw.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I had crayons. And if you draw with crayons hard enough, you can feel the wax on the paper. Yeah.

JAD: But then one day in the summer of 2012, she gets a call.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: From the Lighthouse School in New York City.

JAD: The Lighthouse School?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah, it's a school for the blind.

JAD: Her mom had found out that they were trying out this brand new technology.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I think they were doing this study for the FDA.

JAD: Very experimental. Her mom signed her up. Long story short, Emilie shows up at the Lighthouse School one day and walks into this room, and a guy named Ed gives her this thing.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: He gives me the device.

JAD: Can you describe it? I mean, is it a big helmet or ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No, it's not. It's just like a regular pair of sunglasses.

JAD: Though they were a little heavier than your normal sunglasses she says, because right on the front, like on the bridge of the nose, was a little camera pointing forward.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And then attached to the sunglasses was a little wire ...

JAD: That ran out of the camera and down to this little square piece of metal.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I think it's made out of titanium, and it's just like the size of a postage stamp, or a little bit thicker, though.

JAD: Ed explained to her that the little piece of titanium was filled with thousands of electrodes. And what was gonna happen is that the camera was gonna convert images into patterns of electricity on that little square. So he told her to take the little square ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Place it on your tongue ...

JAD: Put it right on the center of your tongue ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: ... and close your mouth. So I put it on and they turned it on, and it was like—it started to tickle. Imagine a lot of Coca-Cola. Like, a lot of bubbles on your tongue and always, like, prickly—prickly feelings.

JAD: The idea behind this thing, according to science writer Sam Kean ...

SAM KEAN: Author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons.

JAD: … is that we actually see with our brain, not our eyes. I mean, it might seem like our eyes are doing the seeing and our ears are doing the hearing and our fingers and the tongue are doing the tasting and the touching, but that's actually not how it works. Each of our senses sends signals into the brain as electricity.

SAM KEAN: Little blips on nerves.

JAD: And it is the brain that then converts those little blips into what you perceive as a sight or a sound or a smell. Now obviously, someone who is blind, their retina is not sending those signals anymore. But what if there is another way to get signals for light and dark and color into our brains?

SAM KEAN: In all of our brains there are lots and lots of pathways going from every part of the brain to every other part of the brain. And normally, your brain isn't using those pathways, even though they exist. It's like there's a road there but it's shut down and traffic can't be on it. But ...

JAD: What if you could open up some of those routes?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: He just let me sit with it on for an hour or two hours.

JAD: Emilie says at first she had no idea what was happening. She would just swivel her head around and feel the patterns on her tongue change.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: And every time I looked around he'd say, "Oh, that's a chair. That's a door. That's me. That's your mom."

JAD: And it went on like this for a while. Ed showed her a ball and a square ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: A plastic banana.

JAD: And nothing was really happening for her except for the prickly feelings on her tongue. But then there was this moment.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Ed had this really long Styrofoam rod and he flashed it in front of me. He moved it up and down in front of my face. And I was like, "Oh my God, what was that?"

JAD: Suddenly she says she just saw it.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I was like, "Oh my God!" It just happened on its own.

JAD: What did it look like?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So in my mind's eye, it looked like a long, white, skinny stick.

JAD: Could you see the texture of the stick? Or ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: No, I couldn't see texture. I couldn't see in three dimensions. It was very flat. It was kind of like that kid's toy, Lite-Brite.

JAD: Yeah.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So imagine, like, a black screen and little, tiny white dots.

JAD: All arranged in a line. So Emilie was allowed to keep the BrainPort device for about a year-and-a-half. And during that time, the Lite-Brite resolution of it did get better as her brain learned to speak tongue.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: It was awesome. When I saw the people moving ...

JAD: And one of the things that really struck me in our conversation was I asked her about this video that her mom had sent me showing her wearing the device and walking down the street. And she told me that usually, you know, now that she's blind, when she's walking down the streets of New York City ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Especially uptown where the streets are a lot wider.

JAD: ... she says would people see her and her white cane and walk a really wide circle around her.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: So I—yeah, I hardly ever notice other people walking around me. It feels like I'm just walking alone. I can always hear the traffic and the sounds of traffic, but not other people.

JAD: But she says when she put the device on and put that little sensor on her tongue, the sidewalk came alive.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I thought it was amazing. Like, I didn't know this many people were on the street at the same time as me. And now they're all—they're all there again.

JAD: But she described them in a way that sounded almost like a painting.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Like really soft blotches. Everything was really soft, like soft blotches of ink that could move. They were walking and I could see their legs moving and I could see them—their gait, but I couldn't see them clearly. Like, I couldn't see their features or whether they were wearing a shirt, or shorts, or a dress or pants. I'd just, like, see their shadows. And every now and then I'd see the light casted on them.

JAD: Really?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah.

JAD: I imagine somehow like underwater creatures?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Uh-huh.

JAD: Squishy, jellyfish-like?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah. Yeah, like lighting up. Yeah, like that.

JAD: And that, for Emilie, is what it's like to translate the city with your tongue. New York City becomes this hazy sea of walking fish that make their way along in the sunshine.

[AZZA KHALIL: (Amazing Grace sung in Arabic)]

 

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