This is a degeneration of the retina.

I had retinal detachment five years ago.

So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math.

In retinal separation, the retina detaches from the back of the eyeball.

And now today we have the modern multi channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure.

So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception.

This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth.

And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano.

So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission.

But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following.

51 Days 52 Days Developing retina, nose and fingers The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.

and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them.

And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce.

As a musician, I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant, I'd be heartbroken. I'd just be plainly heartbroken, because I know that music would never sound the same to me.

So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too.