I am going to try to explain my issue with the comparison for “low resolution”. Please excuse me if this seems unnecessary, or long winded but to me there is a difference.
First off, the comparison of 16,000 hair cells to 22 electrodes is not correct. Yes, there are 16,000 hair cells but only 4000 of them are used for true sound. Additionally, the 22 electrodes use a completely different method to broadcast sound signal. This is done using direct electrical stimulus vs fluid motion and detection of the hair cells.
I will use the analogy of a prosthetic leg to demonstrate my point. When a person receives a prosthetic leg, they have a chunk of plastic and steal which can be attached to their hip. It in no way looks, feels, or acts like a real leg. This is the same as the CI. It is a prosthetic. The idea that a person can compare the “fidelity” of a functioning ear to a replaced one is not correct. If it were, then we would not need to train the brain to hear. Low fidelity can be heard and understood right away from a functioning ear and does not need training.
We receive an alternate form of stimulus with the CI and it has nothing to do with our natural biology. If we are lucky, and are brains are placid enough, then most can interpret the electrical signals as a sound replacement. All of this happens within the brain and is part of how we naturally interact with the world.
The comparison to the human eye “This would be the equivalent of our eyes only seeing the world broken up into 22 large pixels “, is also not correct. The retina of the human eye has about 127 million photoreceptors — rods and cones — to process visual signals. And there is no way to replace this function today. There is no CI for the eye. If there were, it also would be a very different way to “see”. Who knows what the brain would put together from an electrical signal? It might be an ambiguous blob resembling space relations to objects… It might more closely resemble radar or sonar images…
More details on the inner ear function:
Kind regards,
Dave