In my second mapping session today we adjusted the right ear to give more current in the high-frequency electrodes. That makes speech crisper, and I can get occasional words here and there when listening to books on tape. It sounds tantalizingly like real language, but I haven’t broken through yet.
– Yet? That’s like getting a bionic arm on Thursday and expecting to be able to play catch with it on Friday.
Still, it sounds so much like language that I’m wondering why my brain isn’t able to decode it. In a comment on “The World Whole and Full” Steve wrote, “Perhaps…something clicks in the brain that says ‘oh hey, I know what this is, communication — it’s time to access the speech comprehension database that the other ear uses all the time.’”
But I can’t say I’m having that experience. I’m not tapping into the database yet.
Perhaps the missing link is that I haven’t listened to books-on-tape while following along with the text yet. Maybe for a new ear, a new one-to-one mapping between percept and meaning needs to be established before comprehension can happen.
After the mapping I went to meet with two friends in a cafe in Palo Alto. This was my first social encounter since activation, and the setting was a doozy: dozens of people yammering away, cappucino machines howling, baskets of rattling forks, and rain pattering outside, lots of it.
Man, did it help to have a second ear. It helped considerably more than I expected it to. Even though the ear can’t deliver meaningful language yet, it delivers phonemes, lots of them, good solid ones. Here’s an analogy to describe what it felt like. Say that hearing’s like walking a tightrope across a river. It helps a lot to have one rope to hold onto — that’s like having one ear. Having two ropes, one on each side, makes things that much firmer and more solid; a sway in one direction can then be corrected by having the other side to push against.
That’s what having two ears is like.
So even though the right ear can’t understand much of anything on its own yet, the fact that it’s delivering phonemes in synchrony with the left gives me backup. If an “s” sound on the left is backed up with a simultaneous percept of crispness on the right, that makes the “s” that much more definitively an “s”.
Another side to lean on. I tried pulling off the right headpiece to see what things were like without it, and that side I was leaning on just dropped away. I lasted all of ten seconds before sticking it back on. “ Wow, that helps,” I said. “Wow.”
I understood both of my friends without having to work very much to do it; it was easy. Amid the yowling of the cafe we had a perfectly civilized conversation.
Now I’ve just spent half an hour watching Seinfeld, right ear only, with Elvis snoozing on my chest. The extra amperage in the high frequencies makes all the characters sound over-the-top Noo Yawk nasal. Even Elaine, shiksa quintessential, sounds Jewish now.
I needed the captions to follow it. But there was an uncaptioned ad, a political spot for casino gaming laws, that I understood entirely. That really surprised me, since I didn’t get any of the ones before or after. Something about that particular voice came through as English.
So there was my breakthrough moment. The first thing my dead right ear understands on its own after thirty years of silence? An ad for casino gaming laws.
I’ll take it.
In my second mapping session today we adjusted the right ear to give more current in the high-frequency electrodes. That makes speech crisper, and I can get occasional words here and there when listening to books on tape. It sounds tantalizingly like real language, but I haven’t broken through yet.
– Yet? That’s like getting a bionic arm on Thursday and expecting to be able to play catch with it on Friday.
Still, it sounds so much like language that I’m wondering why my brain isn’t able to decode it. In a comment on “The World Whole and Full” Steve wrote, “Perhaps…something clicks in the brain that says ‘oh hey, I know what this is, communication — it’s time to access the speech comprehension database that the other ear uses all the time.’”
But I can’t say I’m having that experience. I’m not tapping into the database yet.
Perhaps the missing link is that I haven’t listened to books-on-tape while following along with the text yet. Maybe for a new ear, a new one-to-one mapping between percept and meaning needs to be established before comprehension can happen.
After the mapping I went to meet with two friends in a cafe in Palo Alto. This was my first social encounter since activation, and the setting was a doozy: dozens of people yammering away, cappucino machines howling, baskets of rattling forks, and rain pattering outside, lots of it.
Man, did it help to have a second ear. It helped considerably more than I expected it to. Even though the ear can’t deliver meaningful language yet, it delivers phonemes, lots of them, good solid ones. Here’s an analogy to describe what it felt like. Say that hearing’s like walking a tightrope across a river. It helps a lot to have one rope to hold onto — that’s like having one ear. Having two ropes, one on each side, makes things that much firmer and more solid; a sway in one direction can then be corrected by having the other side to push against.
That’s what having two ears is like.
So even though the right ear can’t understand much of anything on its own yet, the fact that it’s delivering phonemes in synchrony with the left gives me backup. If an “s” sound on the left is backed up with a simultaneous percept of crispness on the right, that makes the “s” that much more definitively an “s”.
Another side to lean on. I tried pulling off the right headpiece to see what things were like without it, and that side I was leaning on just dropped away. I lasted all of ten seconds before sticking it back on. “ Wow, that helps,” I said. “Wow.”
I understood both of my friends without having to work very much to do it; it was easy. Amid the yowling of the cafe we had a perfectly civilized conversation.
Now I’ve just spent half an hour watching Seinfeld, right ear only, with Elvis snoozing on my chest. The extra amperage in the high frequencies makes all the characters sound over-the-top Noo Yawk nasal. Even Elaine, shiksa quintessential, sounds Jewish now.
I needed the captions to follow it. But there was an uncaptioned ad, a political spot for casino gaming laws, that I understood entirely. That really surprised me, since I didn’t get any of the ones before or after. Something about that particular voice came through as English.
So there was my breakthrough moment. The first thing my dead right ear understands on its own after thirty years of silence? An ad for casino gaming laws.
I’ll take it.