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Daniel Nest's avatar

That's a very cool topic I'd love to read more about.

I really enjoyed the several minutes of explanation from the guy who received the cochlear implant. I honestly naively assumed that cochlear implants give you a crude but generally directly mappable soundscape that you can quite quickly adjust to (sort of like hearing people talk while you're submerged in the water). It was a revelation that the stuff you hear is initially unintelligible.

I wonder what would happen if you'd ever had a patient who suddenly regained the ability to hear and then removed the cochlear implant. Would they be able to immediately pick up speech (because their brain was once exposed to it) or would they need to relearn because their brain has now physically adjusted to the distorted world of the cochlear implant?

My guess is that it's the latter, knowing what we know about George Stratton's "inverted sight" experiment where the brain adjusted to seeing the world upside down, but then had to re-adjust again when the "inverted goggles" were taken off.

By the way, love your new "When Life Gives You A BrAIn" logo - neat play on words and it better reflects the more all-encompassing nature of your newsletter.

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Mir H. S. Quadri's avatar

An excellent breakdown of a very complex and non-intuitive topic. I love reading and researching about BCIs keeping the whole neurallink hopium aside. I definitely think it's one of the scientific frontiers that are going to see massive breakthroughs within a decade or so and could be as revolutionary as AI itself in terms of impact.

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