"NEURAL: The blind shall see, the deaf shall hear"
Enabling the blind to see and the deaf to hear was once a biblical tale of divine intervention, but today silicon chips are enabling such miracles. The core problems of such "neural implants"-discovering biocompatible-materials and life-like signal-encoding-have enabled man-made electronics to fool the brains of the afflicted into accepting sensory data from artificial sources. So far, hybrid analog/digital sensor systems seem to work best, with analog chips used for the neural implants inside the body and digital chips used for outboard sensory-preprocessing, but for the future, who knows? When the formerly divine becomes man-made, no mortal can predict what miracles may emerge next, but on the drawing board already are such miracles as curing blindness and deafness, enhancing senses, annotating experience, augmenting memory and enabling artificial telepathy.
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Text: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030923S0053