also a tangent - I can't find it right now - something I feel quite similar, albeit far less practical, was an experiment in which neural network was laid out as a 2D grid, i.e. screen, and it was trained so that specific inputs would fire very specific neurons and in that way the "screen" would show a specific image.

what was particularly interesting about that experiment was the fact that you could pack quite a few images in a very small network.