Michael Chorost for a long time wore hearing aids in order to hear because while he did have a hearing loss it was not severe enough to prevent him from communicating with other people. But the book opens up on the day that his hearing went from okay to worse. He could not hear with his hearing aids. The book then narrates his journey from a natural hearing person to what be believes is now a mechanized human, or a cyborg. He discusses the change that he underwent from hearing aids to cochlear implants. From the surgery to the first day of hearing with cochlear implants, Michael Chorost mentions some really interesting points that I would like to discuss further from my own perspective as a deaf person from birth.
Are we really cyborgs? In his book, Michael Chorost spends a lot of time discussing the technology and the fact that Deaf people with cochlear implants replace their natural hearing with a mechanized extension of that sense. But as we go along our daily lives, do we really notice them? Or is just because of my different experience of always having them since I was two-years-old that I do not see it that way. I cannot remember a day that I have gone without my implants without a good reason. They are always there, always working hard so that I enjoy all sorts of small miracles every day, from hearing my own voice, to the voices of the people around me. Every morning, when I wake up, I don't even realize how bizarre it must be that I cannot hear at that exact moment, but whenever I want I can just take my speech processor and put it on my head and I am back in the hearing world. I owe a great debt for the tremendous thought and effort that many different people in all sorts of different collaborative fields put into creating this small powerful machine. The point that I think I am trying to make is that, it is not a part of my body that I notice all the time, it is like another limb, it is part of me, functioning behind the scenes, but it doesn't define me. It's part of who I am, not what I am. Know what I mean? Maybe not, it is hard to explain. Its like a blog almost. It captures part of who you are as you write, but it does not make what you are.
As I listen to music to spice up the morning while I am writing this, I laugh at the irony of how practiced and unthinking I am as I plug in my headphones in order to hear the music from my laptop. It‘s just like how other people just take their headphones out of their pockets and place them into their ears. It's a mindless action. It was a simple action that I don't usually think about too deeply, but I just did something that most of my peers cannot do. But it is still an action that we all take in order to enjoy music, the action may be different but we are all humans never-the-less experiencing the same love for sound.
Another interesting point that Michael Chorost brought up was the idea of how amazing the brain really is. The internal device has a cord with an electrode array that reaches into the cochlea, and stimulates the cochlea in a completely artificial fashion. The brain doesn't care, that information can still be turned into sound for us to use. That is incredible. But it brings up questions about reality, after-all the brain took in external artificial information and chooses how to utilize that information in order to bring a sensation to the patient. It raises the idea that perhaps, reality is not so rigid as we would like to think it is. After-all the brain did make up a sensation, which brings into question what the real world really is, compared to what we perceive.
Regardless, I still go on with my daily life without a thought to my amazing little helper riding on my ear.
Wow! That last big paragraph is a mind-blower! Great blog--it's a different view on "reality."
ReplyDeleteI'd never thought of having cochlear implants as being a cyborg, but it is certainly an interesting idea. I wouldn't be surprised if scientists and engineers came up with other machines that could be implanted in to a person to aid them, so maybe we are closer to what we normally think of as cyborgs than we think.
ReplyDelete