Patent ID: 8000797

Claim:
A method for stimulating a plurality of electrodes in a neural implant, wherein each one of the plurality of electrodes is associated with one of a plurality of channels, the method comprising: accepting an input signal in each of the channels, each of the input signals representative of a sensory environment; adjusting one or more of the input signals by one or more corresponding inhibition signals to generate an effective input signal for each of the channels, each of the effective input signals having an effective input magnitude; selecting a channel from among the plurality of channels as a winning channel based on the effective input magnitudes of the effective input signals, the winning channel having an effective input signal with the largest effective input magnitude out of all of the effective input signals; generating an output signal for the selected channel; and selectively generating an inhibition signal for the selected channel in accordance with an inhibition scheme, the inhibition signal having an initial maximum magnitude that decays over a predetermined period of time; wherein the inhibition signal is configured to reduce a strength of an input signal corresponding to the selected channel in order to reduce a likelihood that the selected channel will be subsequently selected as the winning channel during the predetermined period of time.