You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about cochlear implants, and more, from Michael Chorost’s new book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human.
At its most personal level, Rebuilt is a touching and inspiring coming-of-age story about a child who becomes a man, and a better human being, through a constant, lifelong struggle to overcome barriers and limitations imposed by his physical disability, by society and by his own unique, complex intelligence and psychology. At its most instructional level, it is the clearest and most graphic description you will find of how deaf and hard-of-hearing people cope in a media-saturated world that increasingly makes the ability to hear, assimilate, process, understand, regurgitate, and communicate an increasing overload of information a requirement for success in life. But at its most philosophical level, it explores the shifting sands of the reality — the many versions of reality — that we all experience and must try to comprehend in an era where technological innovation, accumulation of knowledge, and conflicts between cultures, societies and competing political systems are not just progressing more rapidly than in any previous period of history but accelerating at geometric rates.
Chorost describes the profound, multiple changes in perception of reality that a cochlear implant recipient goes through in losing hearing and then regaining it, through the implant’s increasingly sophisticated digital approximations of the functions performed by the human hearing organs, and through the human brain’s remarkable “re-mapping” to process and comprehend the new inputs from the implant’s processor. Chorost explains how the digital implant is the product of the perceptions of reality held by multiple people. The people defining his collective perception of reality include hardware designers who made critical choices about which analog waves to convert into the digital electronic bits blasted as electronic pulses directly into the hearing nerves of the inner ear, the software designers who developed the algorithms that convert the digital ones and zeros into intelligible speech and sound, and the first human guinea pigs who had surgery to install the first crude implants and who worked interactively for hours with programmers describing in words the sounds the programmers were trying to recreate digitally and injecting electronically into their heads. “My sensory universe is now constructed by squadrons of programmers, not the garden fields of my ear. Unitary identity? Not anymore, if ever; there are two minds in my skull, one built by my genes, the other by a corporation. I am a walking collective….”
Chorost goes on to explain how all individuals’ realities are based on varying perceptions of the physical world, with none of the perceptions being completely accurate or truly representational. In a beautifully descriptive passage, he takes the reader into the ear’s cochlea and then explains how human hearing-hair cells actually distort physical sounds: “In a dream I stumbled in a field, and fell….It is the field of cell-sized hairs in my cochlea….All around me the stereocilia sway back and forth like kelp on a sea floor….To my right and left stretch 12,500 of the outer hair cells and 3,500 of the inner ear hair cells, disappearing in each direction around the bend of the great spiral going from base to apex….” As sound waves enter the cochlea and activate the cells, they “muster up floods of neurotransmitters, and send streams of electricity to my brain.” Most important, the hearing hairs distort the actual sound signals and shape them to enable the brain to accommodate them, dampening the too-loud sounds and amplifying the too-soft sounds such as speech to enable humans to get the information they need to live and cope successfully in the physical world: “The ear is not a passive organ. It responds actively to the world to shape sensation more to its liking, the hair cells harmonizing in a complex and lovely interactive dance.”
As Chorost tries out and gets used to new and successively sophisticated versions of the sound-processing software that give him very different auditory and perceptual experiences, he also realizes the extent to which peoples’ realities can be shaped by other human hands: “I had learned, viscerally, how constructed my perception was. My body’s ‘original language’ had been shattered into a post-Babelian heterogeneity of codes. Experiencing the world through CIS, SAS, and Hi-Res had destroyed my innocent belief that the senses gave a veridical representation of the world….”
Then Chorost uses the changes in perception he has gone through as a compelling descriptive metaphor for Postmodern Man’s most significant challenge: learning how to fashion and adopt a coherent yet flexible and evolving context for understanding and relating to the world in useful and productive ways, even as new, media-driven information and technology-driven forces and relationships constantly require individuals to revise and recreate their own perceptions of reality. In an era when humans’ inability to clearly see, describe, understand and cope with reality in productive ways might well lead to annihilation of the species in a nuclear cloud, a smothering prison of poisonous greenhouse gases, or some resistant strain of super-bacteria, this quest for a clear and useful understanding of current realities is a life-and-death challenge.
It’s a challenge Chorost tried and failed to meet when he experienced his one academic failure in a life otherwise defined by stellar academic achievement — washing out of the elite PhD program in English literature at Duke University. At the time in the early 1990s, Duke had the leading academic department in the world exploring a new postmodernist approach to literary theory called “deconstruction.” The theory holds that language itself defines content, and that all texts — and the values and biases represented in them — should be open to a process of “deconstruction” in which ideas are separated from the language used to represent them, with each analyzed on its own and within the context of the social, cultural, political and economic environment in which the literature is created. The process seeks to understand and interpret the many ways words can represent reality given the contexts in which they are written. One result of this process is ongoing questioning of the veracity of the “enduring” themes of the Western classics, which can be interpreted and analyzed as constructions of the cultural, political and intellectual forces and contexts of the times in which they were written rather than accurate representations of the reality or truth of those or any other times. The process inherently challenges any kind of political, religious, social or cultural orthodoxy. Chorost does well initially in the program, but at the oral exam prior to starting his thesis dissertation, he exhibits a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose and goals of this process and must leave the program.
The brilliance and triumphant drama of Chorost’s book comes in his intellectual awakening years later, following his cochlear implant. As he struggles to start hearing and understanding in entirely new ways, and as he meditates on the meanings of perception, experience, cognition and multiple realities, he achieves a new understanding of the many contexts or lenses through which reality can be interpreted. The intellectual empowerment he gains from this new knowledge has a liberating effect on him that starts his transformation into the kind of engaged, caring, and understanding human being he has always yearned to be. At the beginning of the book, he writes eloquently about his painful social isolation and intellectual alienation as an excluded, hard-of-hearing youth who had turned to computers and away from engagement with others: “Again and again I made overtures and was rejected. I had always been sort of: sort of hearing, sort of socially aware, and as one dating prospect ambiguously said to me, sort of adorable. I felt, as a result, sort of human.” Later, though he fears that becoming a bionic, cochlear-implanted “cyborg” will make him even more of a nerd or a geek, he realizes the process of learning how to hear and understand reality in multiple contexts has in fact made him more of a real person: “My bionic hearing…made me more human, because I was constantly aware that my perception of the universe was provisional, the result of human decisions that would be revised time and again….The very provisionality of my perception reminded me that my political perspective was provisional also, and that it was my task as a human being to strive to connect ever more complexly and deeply with the people and places of my life.”
Finally, he enlarges the scope of his book, from the individual to the universal, with a meditation on how his new and more complex processing of the multiple realities people experience bears on society and mankind: “Politicians gain power by claiming that they offer the One True Way to know the world. To the masses, they offer certitude, resolve, power. But it is only the appearance of power. A perspective that sorts everything in the world into good and evil is itself the greatest possible evil, because it blinds the storyteller to the complexity and multidimensionality of the world….” Chorost concludes with a declaration of his hard-earned postmodern humanism, which integrates his mind, his body and his digital cochlear implant: “It was not that I had acquired a postmodern way of thinking. It was that I had acquired a postmodern body. It had taught me what I could not grasp when I was at Duke. To the question, ‘What is representation?’ I would now answer, ‘Representation is the act of creating an interpretation of an otherwise unknowable reality.’” This ongoing act of creation — of creating and interpreting new realities based on ever-changing contexts for understanding — is also a pretty good answer to the question, “What’s it like to be hard of hearing in a world that values information, understanding and change above all else?”
Michael Chorost’s book is important not just for those who want to understand what it’s like to be hard of hearing or what it’s like to get a cochlear implant. It’s for anyone looking for ways to cope with and better understand a world where change is accelerating at a seemingly impossible pace. It’s for anyone seeking to become more human through better understanding how we perceive and cope with the realities we must live with.
Oh, and like any best seller, it’s got sex, too. But you’ll have to buy the book and read it for yourself to see if he gets the girl.