Tales from a Bionic Ear

I just heard a fascinating podcast interview with Michael Chorost, who had a computer implanted in his skull to regain his hearing. Chorost went completely deaf shortly after he completed his Ph.D. in English, and he speaks eloquently about the experience of losing an organic sense and gaining an electronic facsimile. Bionic hearing, it seems, is impressionistic.

I was so intrigued by the descriptions in the interview that I zoomed over to Chorost’s site, where I read the first chapter of his book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. The frequent footnotes made it a tad academic, but reflections like these made it very personal:

Those chips would send signals down a wire going to my cochlea through a tunnel drilled through an inch and a half of bone. In a sense, the [implantation] process would be a reconstruction of my entire body. To be sure, I would still be nearsighted, still brown-haired, still delighted by chocolate and allergic to sesame seeds. But the sense of hearing immerses you in the world like no other. To see is to observe, but to hear is to be enveloped.

As a musician, I can't imagine what I'd do if I lost my hearing. And yet, my father was just fitted for hearing aids, so who knows how much time any of us has left? I'll be checking out Chorost's book, and encourage you to check out the podcast.

The interviewer, incidentally, is Andrew Keen, who is amassing quite a collection of voices on the slippery relationship between technology and culture. His discussion with Tim O’Reilly brought out some surprising ideas, and I still wonder what I should have said differently in my interview.