Paul Davies, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article in which he argues that cochlear implants are transforming deaf eduction.
He points out that cochlear implants have been around for two decades. However, it was only seven years ago (and five from when the article was written) that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the devices for use in children as young as 12 months. A child who receives cochlear implants at such a young age has an exponentially larger potential to take on spoken language. Davies goes on to say that “now a new generation of children is entering deaf schools with the hope that they may someday hear and speak almost as naturally as those without hearing problems.” I would add the important delineation that these are really the “hopes” of the parents.
He goes on to say that supporters of the venerable culture of the Deaf believe that deaf children should get a strong grounding in American Sign Language so that they can participate fully in that culture when they grow up. But others- including some deaf kid’s parents who can hear- want more emphasis on hearing and speaking English to prepare the children for life in the “mainstream world”. There is a contentious debate that is ongoing in deaf culture around these issues.
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God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
-Ogden Nash
Ormia ochracea between two hearing aids
An interesting journal article was published in Nature (April 2001) concerning a study done on a particular fly’s amazing sense of directional hearing.
Whereas most flies have no sense of hearing whatsoever, the parasitic fly Ormia ochracea enjoys an excellent sense of directional hearing. Humans have a highly evolved directional hearing sense which is aided by the fact that our ears are up to six inches apart. The Ormia’s ears are just a half millimeter apart but it has directional hearing that rivals ours through a uniquely evolved system.
side note: while most sounds can be distinguished quite well with one ear alone, the task of pinpointing where sounds are coming from in space requires a complex process called binaural fusion, in which the brain must compare information received from each ear, then translate subtle differences into a unified perception of a single sound—say a dog’s bark—coming from a particular location.
Through an elaborate experiment, researches discovered that the Ormia could listen to a cricket sound and discern its location down to the nearest 1 or 2 degrees! They note that “even humans trying to detect who is speaking in a crowded room can’t do better than that”.
That Ormia has managed to develop such a sophisticated sense of hearing despite its miniscule size leads the researchers to hope that they may learn from this fly and create ever more powerful yet tiny hearing aids.
Other studies concerning this parastic fly and it’s exceptional hearing can be found at..
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Margalit Fox, a New York Times journalist originally trained as a linguist, wrote a new book, Talking Hands. The book details an intriguing community made up of deaf signers in the Middle East and in doing so touches upon a lot of interesting subjects. I will be reading the book and I’ll post an entry on my thoughts. [thanks to Jeff Roth for the link]
I like to see an author who can help dispel the myths surrounding sign language and deaf culture. On her website for the book she points out that sign language is not a universal language as as is often thought. On the contrary, each country has its own unique sign language. There are still some major universities around the country that have not yet accepted that sign language is a complete and grammatically complex language as any other. Marget points out that, ” The sign languages that Deaf people speak every day are real, natural languages, as grammatical complex and fully human as any spoken language. No one sat down and invented them. Instead, they arose spontaneously in places where Deaf people had the opportunity to congregate, and have evolved historically over time, just as spoken languages do. (Sign languages even have regional and ethnic dialects!)”.
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Several states have insurance mandates for hearing aids. Good for them. This is a start. The states include: Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
Rhode Island gets props for having first mandate and the most comprehensive- including coverage for both children and adults. God forbid parents of hearing impaired children could afford to have their kids fitting with hearing aids along with adults. The evils of socialized medicine!
Befitting of the byzantine beauracracy of the United States and the quagmire that is called health insurance- requirements vary by state for age covered, amount of coverage, benefit period, provider qualifications, and type of hearing loss.
Let the senator of your State know what you think about this issue.
The award of opulence goes to this diamond encrusted, solid 24k gold hearing aid and remote. If you have 50,000 dollars to throw around and the vanity to boot, go ahead and buy this. Be seen with your bling bling hearing aid and bling H20- the trendy new bottle of water seen throughout Hollywood. Only Flavor Flav could sport this kind of hearing aid with style.
Those of us that make up the poorer lot will spend a measly 6,000 dollars for a pair of digital hearing aids. The proprietor of this hearing aid, Widex, does make some great hearing aids. This particular model is a BTE (behind-the-ear) hearing aid that is powerful enough for “open fittings” - a nice feature because it lets in more natural sound and sounds less occluded. Occlusion is the tech-speak for “sounds like your talking inside of an echoing barrel”. The real reason open fittings are popular: baby boomers love how invisible they are.
I can imagine the cash drenched oaf showing the ladies his diamond adorned hearing aid- and maybe, at the end of the night, he can take them to this gravity defying magnetic floating bed (no joke).
My outstanding audiologist for 15 years, Gustav F. Haas, Ph.D., left his business rather unceremoniously and left me this sobering communication:
The Hearing Center Update, July 2001
“After 19 years at this and the Hopkins Ave. [San Carlos, Ca] location, the Hearing Center will close on approximately August 15th. I would have liked to see an experienced, knowledgeable, and responsible person take over this office, but a search of over three years as proved fruitless. Development in Managed Care have succeeded in reducing this business to the point where its not possible to make a living. At the same time, expenses have increased (rent more than doubled last October). It is thus not surprising that of a number of people who showed interest in this practice, no one has followed through. Whether or not this will be true of all individual health care practices remains to be seen, but the trend has been for consolidation into larger organizations, often with less personal attention to patients.
… I have enjoyed working with you and thank you for your past support. I truly regret not being able to continue to provide an office at this location, and would especially like to thank those of you who referred others to us. Unfortunately this was not enough; I could not compete with the marketing of large HMO’s and did not want to do fictitious “25% off” promotions.”
Recently, while going through some old unsorted papers I had kept in a box, I came across this communication. Finding this letter again was a catalyst to starting this site..
You can find Gustav F. Haas at www.hearingadvice.org. He provides consulting for consumers and professionals. The service for consumers is intended for current or prospective hearing aid users looking for advice free from any bias for or against specific manufacturers.
“Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.” - Kurt Vonnegut
Luckily for me I can’t hear a damn thing the Evangelicals are gibbering about. In their feverish bouts of god-infused wailing, I can make out “jezus, brr, baa, warlocks evil something something sinful gnobwit”. I could learn a lot from these caring people. They are trying so hard to teach me their terminal truths, that global warming is a lie, and I’m drowning in their condescending dribble and my hearing aid battery is flickering out. I’m now doomed to fall into a fiery cauldron with flesh eating snakes when I die, having never been saved. Maybe the gnostics can sign to me.
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Scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a flexible battery made of carbon nanotubes and plain old paper. This battery holds a fair amount of power: 110Mah/g and is capable of powering a small fan.
A flexible battery like this could bode well for future hearing aid designs. I’ve found that the battery compartment on my hearing aid is one of the weakest links - the most likely to break and a size constraint. These batteries wouldn’t require as much material sandwiched around them.
While the narcissistic fixation on making hearing aids invisible seems overdone sometimes, I would still love to see the BTE hearing aids I wear get a little smaller while still being powerful enough to allow open air fixings (essentially a hearing aid with no mold in my ear) for my type of hearing loss. A flexible battery could potentially allow an “open-air” and flexible design such as this one- the wire ear:
The wire ear design has a lot of potential. The new form enhances usability and addresses a number of technical problems. The microphone is located in front of the ear, maximizing the opportunity of sound capture. The speaker is placed within the ear canal to reduce acoustic error resulting in improved sound quality and effectively decreasing the ‘echo’ sensation experienced when the close proximity of the speaker to the eardrum gives the sound a natural boost in volume. Another benefit of the distance between these elements is the reduction in auditory feedback. A flexible battery would fit well with this flexible design.
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I don’t know who to give credit to exactly (maybe director Michael Gondrey or writer Charlie Kaufman?)- but the movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind sports some of the most cutting edge and impressive captions I have ever seen. The subtitles are in a feature rich English SDH format. Check them out for yourself. Captions are usually a run of the mill affair- they take the script and print it out on the bottom of the screen in block letters. But this movie does them differently…
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Michael Chorost, a cochlear implant user and avid supporter of its use, recently gave a speech at Gallaudet University. Michael is a deaf person who grew up using the English language. He was anxious about giving a speech at Gallaudet:
Before I came here I was worried that I would feel like a minority, and a disliked one at that. I was especially anxious because my book is clearly supportive of cochlear implantation. Yet I felt warmly welcomed on campus, and I was surprised to see that a substantial percentage of the students had cochlear implants.
Michael touched upon some very interesting issues facing the deaf and hearing impaired communities. One these, concerning race, class and hearing technology caught my attention-
… other studies, which I’ve discussed at length in chapter 8 of my book, suggest that in the U.S., access to cochlear implants is still very much conditioned by race and class. You might think, for example, that African-Americans, being 12% of the U.S. population, would also be 12% of the implanted population. In fact, they’re only 4% of the implanted population. And that’s despite the fact that minorities have a higher incidence of disabilities than the Caucasian population. These numbers suggest that most white and wealthy kids will get implants and live entirely in the hearing world, while many nonwhite and poor kids will become signing deaf. The conclusion I draw in my book is that not only is the signing deaf community likely to become smaller, it will become more multiracial, and unfortunately, more economically disadvantaged.
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