Written By Zoe Camper, Las Vegas
On the 21st April 2019 an article was published on the BBC News website about a profoundly deaf seven-year-old girl Leia Armitage.
Leia was born with no inner ear or hearing nerve, a hearing aid would be of no use. At the age of two she had cutting edge surgery at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (UK), to insert a device directly into her brain to stimulate the hearing pathways.
Along with a microphone and sound processor unit worn on the side of her head she could ‘hear’ and her parents painstakingly taught her sounds and words; eventually she was able to speak.
Re-wiring the brain to fix or enhance a specific capability has been the subject of research for many years, it has also been the stuff of science fiction.
In 1966 Swedish physicist and astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén published his vision for the future in ‘The Tale of the Big Computer’. In it he says “the problem of organising society is so highly complex as to be insoluble by t…
