A reporter has her artificial sixth sense removed, misses it

This article is short, but thought-provoking: I spent fully 20 minutes mulling over the ramifications of this woman's strangely intimate experiment where a magnet was implanted in her finger, allowing her to directly experience magnetic fields.

A friend asked how an implanted magnet could impart any sensation, as there wouldn't be a direct neural connection. I assume that it'd produce feeling simply by virtue of being embedded; the deflections caused by different kinds of fields would translate to distinct vibrations or pressures, depending on whether they pulse or not, and their orientation.