Cochlear Implant Quotes

You’re that reason, Portia. My reason. The reason I get out of my bed every morning. The reason I didn’t give a shit about cochlear implants and exploratory surgery. The reason I Google bird trivia and even venture into secondhand bookshops. It’s all for you. Silent you, talking you, I don’t care. It’s like I told you that day all those years ago – you are my forever.

There is a cyborg hierarchy. They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us Deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the Hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture, and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They don’t count as cyborgs those of us who wear pacemakers or go to dialysis. Nor do they count those of us kept alive by machines, those of us made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or antidepressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.

The cochlear implant, as incredible as it is, is not the missing puzzle piece. Rather, it is simply a conduit, a pathway for the essential puzzle piece, the miraculous power of parent talk, a power that is the same, whether a child is born hearing or has acquired hearing via a cochlear implant. Without that language environment, the ability to hear is a wasted gift. Without that language environment, a child will be unlikely to achieve optimally.

Study Questions Define the terms deaf and hard of hearing. Why is it important to know the age of onset, type, and degree of hearing loss? What is the primary difference between prelingual and postlingual hearing impairments? List the four major types of hearing loss. Describe three different types of audiological evaluations. What are some major areas of development that are usually affected by a hearing impairment? List three major causes of hearing impairment. What issues are central to the debate over manual and oral approaches? Define the concept of a Deaf culture. What is total communication, and how can it be used in the classroom? Describe the bilingual-bicultural approach to educating pupils with hearing impairments. In what two academic areas do students with hearing impairments usually lag behind their classmates? Why is early identification of a hearing impairment critical? Why do professionals assess the language and speech abilities of individuals with hearing impairments? List five indicators of a possible hearing loss in the classroom. What are three indicators in children that may predict success with a cochlear implant? Identify five strategies a classroom teacher can use to promote communicative skills and enhance independence in the transition to adulthood. Describe how to check a hearing aid. How can technology benefit individuals with a hearing impairment?

When I climb into bed at night and remove my cochlear implants my entire world stops moving. It is in these quiet moments with myself at night that I find restoration.

Imagine a retinal chip giving you perfect eye sight or the ability to see in the dark; a cochlear implant giving you perfect hearing; a memory chip giving you almost limitless memory. Such brain implants will not be the first neuroprosthetics given that those have been around commercially for three decades. Examples include cochlear implants, and now retinal implants which were first approved by the FDA in 2013. Implants

he and a good part of the Deaf community are against cochlear implants because they don’t believe that being deaf is a disability or that they need to be fixed. He says it would be like white people trying to paint African American people white. Some deaf people also view the use of cochlear implants as a loss of their Deaf Culture.

Marc Goodman is a cyber crime specialist with an impressive résumé. He has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, Interpol, NATO, and the State Department. He is the chief cyber criminologist at the Cybercrime Research Institute, founder of the Future Crime Institute, and now head of the policy, law, and ethics track at SU. When breaking down this threat, Goodman sees four main categories of concern. The first issue is personal. “In many nations,” he says, “humanity is fully dependent on the Internet. Attacks against banks could destroy all records. Someone’s life savings could vanish in an instant. Hacking into hospitals could cost hundreds of lives if blood types were changed. And there are already 60,000 implantable medical devices connected to the Internet. As the integration of biology and information technology proceeds, pacemakers, cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, and so on, will all become the target of cyber attacks.” Equally alarming are threats against physical infrastructures that are now hooked up to the net and vulnerable to hackers (as was recently demonstrated with Iran’s Stuxnet incident), among them bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, and energy pipelines. We are heavily dependent on these systems, but Goodman feels that the technology being employed to manage them is no longer up to date, and the entire network is riddled with security threats. Robots are the next issue. In the not-too-distant future, these machines will be both commonplace and connected to the Internet. They will have superior strength and speed and may even be armed (as is the case with today’s military robots). But their Internet connection makes them vulnerable to attack, and very few security procedures have been implemented to prevent such incidents. Goodman’s last area of concern is that technology is constantly coming between us and reality. “We believe what the computer tells us,” says Goodman. “We read our email through computer screens; we speak to friends and family on Facebook; doctors administer medicines based upon what a computer tells them the medical lab results are; traffic tickets are issued based upon what cameras tell us a license plate says; we pay for items at stores based upon a total provided by a computer; we elect governments as a result of electronic voting systems. But the problem with all this intermediated life is that it can be spoofed. It’s really easy to falsify what is seen on our computer screens. The more we disconnect from the physical and drive toward the digital, the more we lose the ability to tell the real from the fake. Ultimately, bad actors (whether criminals, terrorists, or rogue governments) will have the ability to exploit this trust.

The cochlear implant is really a holding mechanism for a larger debate about assimilation versus alienation, about the extent to which standardizing human populations is a laudable mark of progress and the extent to which it is a poorly white-washed eugenics.

Another question to ask as you evaluate the story is, does it have a hook? In its simplest form, the hook is what got you interested in the subject in the first place. It’s that bit of information that reveals the essence of the story and its characters, encapsulating the drama that’s about to unfold. Sound and Fury, for example, is the story of a little girl who wants a cochlear implant. The hook is not that she wants this operation, nor that the implant is a major feat of medical technology. The hook is that the little girl’s parents, contrary to what many in the audience might expect, aren’t sure they want her to have the operation. It’s the part of the story that makes people want to know more. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, does not hook audiences with the horror of a mass suicide/murder that took place in 1978, even though the film opens with text on screen announcing the event. Instead, the film’s hook is that it promises viewers an insider’s look at what it means to join a community, only to be drawn inexorably into a terrifying, downward spiral. As discussed especially in Chapter 7, the hook is often the last piece of the film to come together, as the themes, characters, and story come more clearly into focus and are distilled into the promise you make to the viewers: This is what this movie is; this is why it’s worth your time; this is why this story needs to be told and demands your attention.

Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed proposition. At eighteen, you are choosing not simply between being deaf and being hearing, but between the culture you have known and the life you have not.