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November 20, 2006: “The 22nd Century” airs on PBS Wednesday, January 17 at 8 p.m.
So after much writing, conference-calling, casting, shooting, and editing, “The 22nd Century,” a PBS show I wrote, will air on January 17th. It’s been an amazing and exhausting process. The early drafts of the script went through a dozen rewrites as the producer and I hashed out what the show would be about. We originally thought it would be about a Matrix-like “brain in a jar” concept, but that quickly evolved into a discussion of the concept of the “World Wide Mind.” In a World Wide Mind, human brains would be physically connected to the Internet the way desktop computers are now, with thousands or even millions of implanted electrodes that monitor and influence individual neural clusters. You get them there by inserting them into the femoral artery in the leg and snaking them into capillaries in the brain — rather the way an angiogram reaches the heart. You then use very sophisticated machine learning algorithms and superfast computers to monitor all the data and correlate it to previously stored brainstates; for example, if the computer knows what your brain does when you think of a dog, then it can figure out when you’re thinking of a dog. It can then contact someone else’s computer, and that computer can figure out how to make its user “receive” a roughly analogous input. It’s a very heavily mediated form of brain-to-brain communication.

When I first read of this idea in Kevin Warwick’s book I, Cyborg, I thought it was completely insane - not least because Warwick provides no technical basis at all on which to consider it even remotely achievable. It’s not a very good book, and I went out of my way to criticize it in my own book. But Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human discusses it much more lucidly, and it convinced me that the idea was at least thinkable. So when PBS came calling, I decided to use that as a personal opportunity to talk to Smart Folks about this idea and write a show exploring it. The producer liked the idea, and off we went.

We interviewed Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at NYU who is creating nanoscale-sized wires that can actually travel into brain capillaries. We interviewed Phil Kennedy at Georgia Tech, who is inserting electrodes into the brains of “locked-in” patients in an effort to enable them to control cursors on computer screens and communicate thereby. From there we explored the implications of the World Wide Mind idea. We interviewed Bill McKibben, author of Enough, who thinks it’s is a perfectly terrible idea even if it could be done. We interviewed James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg, who thinks it would be a great idea if it could be done. We interviewed Steve Mann on what it would be like to be connected to the Internet all the time. We interviewed Ramez Naam himself. And we interviewed me, as an example of a person who actually does have electrodes in his head (in my inner ear, not my brain, let me hasten to say - the inner ear is much simpler than the brain) that send me useful information. Cochlear implants were a lunatic idea forty years ago, and now they’re a commercial technology. Perhaps the World Wide Mind idea will take a similar trajectory.

We’re in the final postproduction stages now, and it’s emerged as a coherent piece of work, rather to my surprise given how much of a scramble it was to get it all together. Is it good? Beats me. Watch it yourself, on January 17th at 8pm on PBS, and decide for yourself.

November 15, 2006: Sad news.
My other cat, Friday, died yesterday. He was fourteen and in deteriorating health from diabetes. I finally had to take him to the vet to be euthanized yesterday afternoon. To be honest, Friday and I had never really liked each other, so I didn’t write about him in my book. But I took care of him for fourteen years, and he was part of our little household in his cranky, demanding way. So it was still very sad taking him to the vet. First the vet injected him with a strong sedative, and he went limp in less than a minute, breathing quietly with dilated eyes. Then there was a second shot of barbiturates to stop his heart, and that took effect in seconds. He died peacefully while I held his head in my hands. The vet let us be alone together, and I cradled him in my lap and cried. He had never willingly rested in my lap in his entire life, and it hit me how much I had missed having that kind of connection with him. It was only now that he was dead that I could truly hold him, and that made me cry. After awhile I calmed down, put his body back on the table, cleaned up my used tissues, kissed him on the top of the head to say goodbye, and left him there. The world feels different today, because it’s a world without Friday in it. It’s a world without him bugging me because he wants milk, or tuna, or Trader Joes canned chicken food, or whatever. I never could figure out what he wanted, and that was a constant source of tension between us. It’s a quieter world without him in it, that’s for sure. I don’t know if Elvis misses him, because they hadn’t interacted much either. At any rate Elvis is fine and is as sweet as ever, and when I finish this entry I’m going to hold him in my lap for a good long time and tell him how much I love him.

October 30, 2006: My visit to Gallaudet.
Two weeks ago I went to Gallaudet. My talk had been canceled, but I went anyway, to listen and learn. I found that the protest at Gallaudet wasn’t about principles or ethics or procedures. It was out of bewilderment and rage that a president had been selected who was manifestly the wrong person to be leading the signing deaf community. I talked to 15 or 20 people during my two days on campus, and there was universal agreement that Jane Fernandes’ style of leadership was remote and autocratic. The day I arrived, 82% of the faculty had voted “no confidence” in her leadership, the front lawn was covered with tents set up by protesters, and a small group of students was staging a hunger strike.

What nobody could understand was why, in the face of such opposition, Fernandes was refusing to step down, and why the outgoing president, I. King Jordan, was supporting her. One faculty member I spoke with argued that the “rule of law” — that is, the decision of the Board of Trustees — outweighed any feelings the community might have, but in that belief she was a very small minority. Virtually everyone else felt passionately that Fernandez had already had her chance to win over her detractors and unify the community, and that her failure to do so disqualified her no matter what the Board of Trustees said.

Many people were enraged that I. King Jordan, who had been revered and loved during his 18 years as president, was now stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the will of his colleagues for no comprehensible reason. People were saying over and over again, “Why is King doing this?” I said to one person, “It’s like a liberal Democrat is suddenly acting like a reactionary Republican,” and she laughed and nodded in agreement. But laughter was otherwise in very short supply during the two days I was on campus. Many of the people I talked to were quite frankly depressed and terrified. It would have been one thing to have a conflict where they understood why the people on the other side were acting the way they were. But they didn’t understand, which made the crisis an ugly, messy, confusing affair. King’s reputation and standing in the community is shattered. It is, as one faculty member told me, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

I was going through my own personal dramas on campus. To be deaf is to be very aware that without sign language or technology one would be locked away in an institution, or condemned to a lifetime of menial labor, or very possibly dead. I knew I would see it at Gallaudet, but nothing had really prepared me for the sight of hundreds of people conversing in beautifully expressive sign. It had me in tears, the awareness that this was a community of people who had been rescued, en masse, from the horrible fate of being languageless. And sign’s such a vivid language: the hands and face come alive in a dance of meaning and feeling. I was especially struck when I saw two hearing people transition from using sign to spoken English. Their faces suddenly seemed much plainer. Boring, even. I wished they would go back to sign.

Being deaf and going to Gallaudet is like being Jewish and going to Israel. All of a sudden, I was no longer a minority. But I didn’t feel at home either, because I don’t know sign language. It was scary, because I didn’t know if any given person would speak English, but moreover, I didn’t know what they would think of me for being obviously deaf yet not speaking their language. The day I arrived, the place felt like a minefield. I went to the store to buy a Gallaudet shirt, but the one I wanted was only in size XL. I didn’t dare to approach the cashier to ask if there was an L in stock, so I slunk out, feeling miserable and invisible.

That motivated me. Over the next 24 hours I learned fingerspelling really, really fast and picked up enough signs to have rudimentary conversations. “My name is M-I-K-E. Nice to meet you.” The next day I returned to the store and signed to the cashier, using a combination of made-up gestures, fingerspellings, and signs, “This shirt is an XL. Do you have an L?” She understood me – a miracle! – and sent someone to look. He returned with a disappointed look, holding the XL in his hand: no L’s. I took the XL from him in a way that signified, I’ll take it anyway. He looked puzzled. “S-Y-M-B-O-L”, I fingerspelled. His face brightened, and he showed me the sign for symbol. I bought the shirt.

But sign was by no means the only language being used on campus. There are many hearing people at Gallaudet, some of them administrators and professors, some of them students who have chosen to immerse themselves in the signing deaf world. And, to my great surprise, there were a substantial number of students with cochlear implants. I gave a talk to an honors class that had, I would say, at least six or seven students with implants. At the Clerc Center on campus, which runs a preschool for deaf children, I saw several children with cochlear implants, two of whom were the children of culturally Deaf parents. They were being taught English as well as sign language, growing up truly bilingual and bicultural. I asked what had motivated the parents to do that. Upward mobility, I was told. The parents wanted their children to have the opportunities that they themselves had not had. An audiologist there said to me, “Gallaudet’s slogan is, ‘Deaf people can do anything, except hear.’ Sooner or later we’re going to have to change that to ‘Deaf people can do anything, including hear.’”

“Including hear,” I echoed, enchanted by the formula. It’s a strange thing to say. It’s like saying, “Blind people can do anything, including see.” But I’m a living example of it. I’m completely deaf, yet I hear. I don’t hear the way normally hearing people do; my auditory world is very different from theirs. But I do perceive sensations that I have learned to interpret as sound. And Gallaudet is marching into a world where more and more of their students will be like that.

What does it mean to be a deaf person who can hear, and what does it mean for Gallaudet? I don’t have normal hearing, and the children I saw at the Clerc Center don’t have it either; even if they learn English well, they’ll need supplementary training and equipment for many years to come. Gallaudet can supply those things. But more than that, Gallaudet is a place that is profoundly about community, about communication, about inclusion, about understanding. Its alumni are deeply committed to it in a way that Harvard and Princeton can only envy. I wonder if Gallaudet could slowly morph into a place where communication is more important than communication despite hearing loss. Perhaps Gallaudet will someday be a world center for the ideas of communication and community, where the physical condition of deafness is its historical background rather than its daily reality. There’s precedent for that. Many American universities were founded for religious purposes but exist now on an entirely secular basis. The religion is gone, but the values remain.

The national press, especially the Washington Post, reported that the Fernandes controversy was driven at least in part by concern about the impact of technologies like cochlear implants. But the Post was wrong. While that concern exists, that’s not what the controversy was about. It was about Fernandes’s personality and leadership style. Many people said to me that Fernandes would often walk past people without even saying hello or making eye contact. That’s problematic in any community, but in a world where body language and facial expressions are of primary importance, it’s intolerable. The deaf community rejected Fernandes the way a human body would reject an organ whose donor wasn’t a tissue match.

And now, so has Gallaudet’s Board of Trustees. Yesterday, it withdrew Fernandes’s nomination as president. It was the right decision. It should have been made weeks ago, but it’s the right decision.

Gallaudet now faces the challenge of finding the right leader. In his 18 years as president King was loving but often not tough when he should have been, which left crucial administrative issues unaddressed. Jane Fernandes, on the other hand, was tough without being loving, which made people fear her without respecting her. What Gallaudet needs now is a president who is both loving and tough. It needs that kind of leadership, because the next decade or two will be utterly crucial in determining whether and how the deaf community will survive in an age of cochlear implants and hair cell regeneration. May it find that person. May that person have wisdom, compassion, and courage.

October 18, 2006: Chaos at Gallaudet.
I was scheduled to give a talk today on campus, but unrest on campus has forced its cancellation. “Unrest” is putting it mildly. The campus was shut down for three days last week by students protesting the appointment of Jane Fernandes to the presidency; 133 students were arrested last Friday; the faculty has voted 138 to 24 asking Fernandes to step down; homecoming events have been canceled; and there have been reports of physical violence against protesters by the police. (See The Washington Post for coverage of all of these events.)

The site I’ve been following the most closely for news is the Gallaudet University Faculty, Staff, Students & Alumni website. The issue is that many on campus believe that Jane Fernandes is not the right person to lead the university. The president of Gallaudet is also, in effect, the leader of the entire signing deaf community in the United States. However, the force of the protests has taken almost everyone by surprise and the situation is evolving on an hourly basis.

My speaker’s bureau told me that it was the first time in 30 years that they’ve had an event cancelled due to civil unrest. I decided to come to Gallaudet anyway, to see for myself what was going on. I’m staying over at an administrator’s house this evening, and will visit campus in the morning. Over the next two days I’ll be meeting various professors and students on an informal basis.

Here’s the questions I’m asking as I get ready to visit campus: What is really going on? What are the underlying issues in the signing deaf community that have brought the campus to this state? What impact is the protest having on the signing deaf community? What does this mean for the future?

October 12, 2006: PEN/USA award officially announced.
PEN/USA has finally released its page officially announcing its 2006 awards. Here’s what they say about my book:

Michael Chorost’s compelling story is the connection between human and human and, more marvelous, human and Machine–in his case, the ingenious and flawed technology of a cochlear implant. Chorost, partially deaf from birth, and suddenly deaf on one day in his thirties, has an implant surgically placed in his inner ear. He then examines, in a way that is at once graceful, funny, delicate and expert, the human ear, the nature of sound and our odd kinship with increasingly sophisticated and adaptable machines. Chorost regards himself as part of the cyborg tribe, those who take irony for granted and for whom the machine is “an aspect of our embodiment.” A well told, satisfying story that skillfully weaves human joys and failings with the successes and shortfalls of technology.

I’m honored and grateful for the award. Details here.

October 10, 2006: A quick update.
A quick update, since I’m too tired to give a full update: I’ve been working away on the PBS pilot, preparing a new version of my book proposal for my agent, reorganizing my USF course and having student conferences, planning my talk at Gallaudet, applying for a Guggenheim grant, and getting ready for guesting on NPR this Thursday. I’ve also been slowly working my way through Season 2 of LOST on DVD for the sheer escapism of it. They’ve been stuck on a desert island for months - how does their hair look so good?

September 27, 2006: The sound of leaves.

Yesterday I was with a TV crew re-enacting a scene from my book describing the day my implant was activated. I so vividly remember that day, how shocked I was at how alien it sounded, how anxious and alone I felt. Here’s the scene, from page 54.

Before I go in the building where my office is, I steer myself on a wide circle around it so I can take a few deep breaths. There are large fibrous magnolia leaves scattered on the ground, turned brown and stiff. Absentmindedly, I kick one.

It tinkles. As it skitters along the ground, it makes a tinny, tinfoily little noise as its edges scrape along the concrete. Disconsolate though I am, I find this deeply interesting. It brings out the six-year-old in me. I kick leaves again and again, sometimes booting a particularly noisy leaf ahead of me three or four times to get maximum entertainment value out of it. Each time, the leaf goes clitter clitter clitter clitter.

That was on October 1, 2001. Almost exactly five years later, I was back at the exact same spot, outside a building at SRI International in Menlo Park. I was walking along kicking leaves — with a cameraman intently following each of my steps and the sound engineer holding a mike on a boom. The leaves, I’m happy to say, also sounded exactly the same to me. The difference was that I was completely thrilled to be there.

September 22, 2006: Enough?

I’m reading Bill McKibben’s book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. Bill McKibben is a bioconservative, but not necesarily a political conservative; his book The End of Nature rings the alarm about global warming and overconsumption. So I find Enough an interesting read, because I share McKibben’s values but disagree with his conclusions.

The essential argument of the book is that if parents could determine their child’s characteristics with genetic engineering – a given height, a given IQ, a given temperament – then the child won’t view his or her achievements as meaningful. If you’re engineered to be smart and kind, McKibbben argues, then you won’t derive any satisfaction from your achievements in the face of challenges and obstacles. He writes:

Now your child is a product. You can take precisely as much pride in her achievements as you take in the achievements of your dishwashing detergent…And what can she take pride in? Her good grades? She may have worked hard, but she’ll always know that she was specced for good grades. Her kindness to others? Well, yes, it’s good to be kind—but perhaps it’s not much of an accomplishment once the various genes with some link to sociability have been catalogued and manipulated…[I] have no doubt that these qualms would be one of the powerful psychological afflictions of the future…

McKibben thinks that a child’s choice and autonomy would be taken away by designer genes. But I don’t agree with that at all. Genes are not destiny. Life consists of doing the best you can with what you’re given, and it doesn’t matter whether the giving was intentional or accidental. I inherited genes for intelligence by luck, but that doesn’t mean I view my achievements as lucky accidents. I still had to work hard for them, and that’s what makes them meaningful to me.

The recipients of designer genes wouldn’t suffer a “powerful psychological affliction” because they’d be too busy being surgeons, engineers, artists, and athletes. Their genes will give them exceptional capabilities. But what they do with those capabilities will still be up to them.

Another argument often raised against designer genes is that they would make everyone alike. I don’t buy that, either. Human variation is so large that controlling superficial traits like height would still leave enormous room for diversity. Even if most males were engineered to be about six feet tall, they’d still have completely different interests, appearances, and talents.

An incredible amount of misery comes from leaving a kid’s genes to pure chance. People suffer all their lives from being fat, or short, or dumb; or from having any number of inherited conditions such as predisposition to cancer or heart disease. If I had the chance to guarantee that any kid I had would be bright, happy, and healthy, you can bet I’d take it. And that kid would still be unique and special, no matter how much gene-tweaking you do.

September 13, 2006: I’m in Playboy.
Not that way.

I’ve got a letter to the editor in the October issue, page 13. I was asked to write it in response to an article by Joel Garreau titled “The New Human” in the July issue. In the article, Garreau predicted that in the near future people would have superhuman strength, enhanced intelligence, and so on. I thought the article was sensationalistic and unrealistic, and I said so. They were nice enough to put my book’s title below my name.

September 8, 2006: A San Francisco scene.
A few months ago, when I was exploring meditation techniques, I went to the San Francisco Zen Center. That day one of the monks had finished her residency there and was giving her farewell lecture. The room was generously open and square, with sunlight streaming in through windows overlooking leafy Page Street. There were perhaps forty monks with shaven heads and long black robes, but there were also visitors like me, in Western dress. And there were families; to my surprise there were at least fifteen children in the room, clustered together, wiggling on little pillows. We all watched the lecturer solemnly gather her robe together and sit down. She’d just learned something new, she told the children. The itsy-bitsy spider song. Would they like to sing it?

They would. She started and everyone joined in, miming the spider’s ascent and descent with their hands. I was treated to the priceless sight of several dozen black-robed monks singing,

The itsy bitsy spider
Crawled up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out…

I don’t remember what she lectured about afterward, but that’s okay, because I didn’t understand it; it was on some fine point of Zen practice. The children were herded out of the room after a few minutes. And I was left with a wonderful memory.

September 2, 2006: Updates on various things.
On rereading this blog, I’ve realized that I tend to bring things up and then not provide updates on them. There’s just so much going on in my life that I can’t keep track of it all. Here’s an update on various things.

Static: No static at all for the past ten days or so. I’m using a different headpiece, and that seems to have solved the problem. I say “seems” because such things come and go. To verify that it’s the headpiece, I’d have to wear it for a day or two with my body processor, and I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet. By the way, several other Clarion users have told me that they experience occasional bursts of static too, which is reassuring - that makes it even less likely that it’s an internal-device issue. Anyway, I’m happily static-free these days.

22nd Century: I’m on the third draft of the pilot. We’ve gone from the Wild Enthusiasm stage to the Utter Confusion stage, which is normal for this kind of thing. I’ve been talking to neurologists and philosophers around the country to gather ideas, and it’s been fascinating. Can I write for TV? Who knows? All I know is that I am writing. Casting is supposed to begin next week! Aaahhh! By the way, apparently I’ll be one of the interviewees as well as the scriptwriter, which puts me in the position of writing dialogue for myself. Putting words into my own mouth.

Dating life, social life: Great. Thanks for asking. No steady sweetie, but I’m dating, and my social life is ten times better than it was before REBUILT came out. And I continue to love living in San Francisco.

Second book: On the back burner for now. I’ve got enough on my plate, what with writing for PBS, teaching writing at the University of San Francisco, consulting to SRI, and mooching publicity out of the PEN award. Which brings me to…

The PEN award: The awards ceremony is December 12th in Beverly Hills. They sent me the list of winners, but they haven’t put it up on their website yet. George Clooney won the scriptwriting award for “Good Night and Good Luck.” Will he be there? Will I get to meet him? Will I be able to ask him what pomade he really used for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Questions, questions.

August 31, 2006: REBUILT in Japanese.
Someone read every word in my book and translated it into Japanese.

I guess that’s supposed to be me, waving what looks like a cowboy hat while backlit by a dewy sunlit dawn. Actually, that’s not a bad image for how I feel these days.

I got the book in the mail an hour ago. I sat on my outdoor steps and paged through it in wonder. I didn’t know Japanese books were read back to front, like Hebrew ones, and that the text ran from top to bottom. Isn’t that a little weird on the eyes?

And there’s me, with Japanese bluhbluhbluhwhatever in the caption next to my head. I could probably teach myself Japanese from this book alone. It’s like a personal Rosetta stone made just for me.

And see, this must be the hearing-test page. You can tell because of the typography, where I reduced the font size to simulate softer sounds. Compare it to the English version:

I’ve figured out a few Japanese numbers. I’ve figured out how the Japanese do dates and italics. I think I know how the translator reproduced my phonetic transliterations of how garbled the world sounded to me at first. I’m still trying to figure out what the translator did with the C++ code in Chapter 5.

It is so strange and funny to see my own words in a totally different form. The book is both mine and not mine; my ideas, but interpreted through someone else’s mind and language. (The translator is Masaharu Tsubaki.) Somewhere, the gods who decreed 41 years ago that I should be deaf are sitting in an empyrean castle laughing their heads off.

August 27, 2006: A day at the races.
I’ve seen auto races on TV, but I never thought I’d be in the pit. I was invited to the Indy Grand Prix in Sonoma by Jaki Scheckter, a bilateral cochlear implant user whose cousin, Tomas Scheckter, drives a very, very fast car. I showed up at the racetrack and signed a disclaimer that essentially said, “You may be decapitated by flying metal. You may burn to death in flaming motor oil. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Have a nice day.”

No problem. I proceeded to the pit, where I met Jaki, who is a very friendly, genial guy. When the race started I was right there next to the pit crew, about fifty feet from the racetrack. Race cars are loud. When 20 of them go by at 140 miles per hour, you can feel it in your bones; you can feel it in your teeth. The only thing I’ve ever heard louder than that was an F-16 flying right over me at treetop level when I was working on a kibbutz in Israel in 1982.

I didn’t hear the cars’ loudness the same way other people would, though. The automatic gain control in my implant doesn’t permit sound to become louder than a preset level. To put it more accurately, it doesn’t allow more than a given amount of electricity to be delivered to my auditory nerves. No sound, however loud, can be uncomfortably loud to me. You could say I’ve been granted an exemption from the laws of physics. So the cars didn’t sound that loud. They felt loud. I could feel sound pressure waves beating against my chest. But I didn’t feel like I had to stick my fingers in my ears (as just about everybody else was doing) or mess with my volume control. My ears and my body were telling me different things. How loud the cars really were, I couldn’t tell you.

But I can tell you that when a driver came in for a pit stop, his crew would leap over a low wall, replace all four tires by snapping them off and on like tinkertoys, and fill the tank with a hose the diameter of my hand. They fill the tank in 10 seconds. Makes sense, when every second in the pit means that the competition gains 200 feet on you.

I also went to a pool party in Sonoma, and it was exactly the Eldorado I had once imagined California might be. Happy people frolicking in sun-splashed water, food aplenty, and lush newly-mown grass to lie in. Ah California!

August 23, 2006: Making the 22nd century in Chicago.
Just got back from Chicago, where the creative team got together for a day to decide what the 22nd century is going to be like. I came in the night before and had dinner with Scott Alexander and Tresha Mabile, who are going to be part of producing it. Afterward I went to the Hard Rock Hotel’s bar across the street from my hotel just to see what was going on. It was full of women, but they were all talking in tight little knots of people, so I stood way at the end of the bar, ordered myself a mojito, and prepared to nurse it quietly in the corner. But I started chatting with the guy next to me, and before I knew it I was gabbing away with him and three extremely cute women, one of whom licked my hand when I held it out to shake hello. That got the 21st century off to a good start. Fun city, Chicago.

The next day — slightly hung over — I headed to the meeting. Strictly speaking, I’m not working for PBS. I’m working for Boston Science (based in Boston, not to be confused with Boston Scientific) and Towers Productions (based in Chicago.) PBS has given them a bunch of money to make a pilot episode, and they’ve brought in Xvivo (Connecticut) to do the computer graphics, and a studio in Minneapolis for the green-screen filming. Green-screen is a special-effects method where you can make it look like the actors are anywhere by compositing a background onto a green screen behind them. And then there’s yours truly from San Francisco, who’s in charge of the scientific content and deciding what the actors are going to say.

The producer, Gino Del Guercio, emailed me the following helpful advice today:

“Since you’re new to television I thought I’d just send you the list of the six stages of television production.

1. Wild Enthusiasm
2. Total Confusion
3. Utter Despair
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Reward of the Non-Involved.”

Thanks, Gino, I’m looking forward to it. All right. Y’all excuse me while I go figure out what brain-machine interfaces will be like 100 years from now.

August 20, 2006: A textbook case of immortality.
You know you’ve made it when college students are being required, nay forced, to read your work. My New Scientist article on stem cell research will be reprinted in a textbook titled American History, to be published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in February 2007. They’ll be retitling it “The Promised Land,” a good idea in my opinion.

As for my detective work on the static, I took the headpiece from the body processor and used it yesterday with the behind-the-ear processor, and all was well. No static. So today I’ll try putting the old headpiece back on and see if I hear it again.

August 19, 2006: Static.
In my March 28th entry below, I talked about device failures and my experience diagnosing equipment problems. I’m having another one, that I haven’t solved yet - so I think I’ll share my detective work as it progresses.

About three weeks ago, I started hearing bursts of static while wearing my CII behind-the-ear processor. In five years of implant use I’ve never heard that before. No implant user likes to hear weird sounds, especially when they’re new weird sounds. I started hearing them more and more often, too. The sound quality hadn’t changed; I was just hearing static on top of things for 10-15 seconds a couple times a day.

Naturally it’s easy to think, “Oh my gosh, maybe the device is failing.” Ahhh! Yiii! But I’m an old hand at this sort of thing, so I started doing detective work.

A few days ago I wore a different processor, my body processor, throughout the day. Hadn’t worn it in years. It felt funny to be walking down the street wearing it with the box on my belt and the wire running down my shirt, but I live in San Francisco for goodness’ sake, there’s a bar six blocks from where I live where a guy in a giant brown penis costume hands out safe-sex brochures. You can wear anything in this city.

No static at all with the body processor. That almost certainly rules out the implant itself as the problem. Good to know.

So I went back to wearing the behind-the-ear processor. I started noticing patterns:

– It happens much more often outside than inside.
– It usually happens when I’m walking.
– It stops completely when I block up the T-mike with my thumb.
– It seems particularly likely to happen when I go from one temperature regime to another, like warm indoors to cold outdoors. (San Francisco is chilly in August.)

So my theory at the moment is that the T-mike is reacting badly to temperature changes.

Tomorrow I’ll try wearing a different T-mike, and we’ll see what happens.

Fascinating, huh? And you get to read stuff like this for free.

August 7, 2006: Inventing the 22nd century.
Last week I was invited, out of the blue, to script the pilot episode of a TV science show tentatively titled “The 22nd Century.” It’d be an imaginative vision of what medicine might look like in the 22nd century. Bionics, nanotech, gene engineering, the works. PBS has commissioned the pilot episode, and if they like it, it’ll become a series.

I said sure. Invent the 22nd century? Me? Why not?

It’s one of those staggering opportunities where you just drop everything and go for it. I’ve been busy inventing characters for the show, working out a conceptual outline, and learning how to write a script. Thinking visually. Thinking about concepts and content. Thinking about who we’d interview.

Thinking, This is crazy — I can’t predict the year 2150 any more than Louis Pasteur could predict MRI scanners. But accuracy in prediction isn’t really the point. The point is to show the most exciting trends in present science and then, with some wit and imagination, invite the viewer to think about what kind of world we could build, if we had the courage and the vision.

July 25, 2006: How geeks fine-tune their cochlear implants.
Okay, those of you with normal hearing can tune out today. This is going to be full-bore technical stuff.

I got an email the other day from a woman saying that she was having trouble hearing in noise, and that when she spoke, her voice was all she heard. Here’s an edited version of the suggestions I gave her. (These tips are couched in the language of Clarion devices, though the general principles should be applicable to users of other implants.)

Get your body processor and wear that for a couple of days, making sure you’re using the same program as in your BTE (behind-the-ear) processor. The body processor lets you control sensitivity as well as volume. Turn the sensitivity down to zero in the supermarket, and see what difference that makes.

At parties, I found that turning my volume way up and my sensitivity down to zero helped me a lot. (That sounds like the recipe for being a jerk, doesn’t it? Volume up, sensitivity down…) I don’t need to do that anymore, but it helped me a lot in the early days.

Try, also, having your audiologist give you a version of your main program that has a smaller input dynamic range (IDR). A high IDR gives you lots of sound, including noise. A smaller IDR may be better for you.

> And when I talk…it seems like that’s all I can hear.

I think I can tell you why that’s happening. The automatic gain control (AGC) is detecting your voice as the loudest sound in the area and temporarily turning the sensitivity way down so that it’s all you hear. (See the bottom of page 146 of my book for an explanation of the AGC.) Have your audiologist turn down the AGC and see how that works for you.

So what you want is three programs in your BTE or body-worn processor (I recommend you use the latter for these experiments, because as I said, it lets you control sensitivity):

1 - your main program
2 - your main program with a lower IDR
3 - your main program with a lower AGC

Try, also, having your audiologist turn off one or two of the electrodes nearest the tip of the electrode array; I find that helps me a lot. For me, those electrodes create low-frequency percepts that mask my ability to hear in the high frequencies. (The high frequencies are what give speech its crispness and clarity.) Believe it or not, I use only twelve of my implant’s 16 electrodes for listening to speech. When I listen to music, I switch to a program that fires all 16.

With all of these options, you won’t be able to tell immediately what works best for you. You have to think in terms of months and weeks, trying each permutation in various environments and gradually figuring out what works for you. Just keep experimenting, and you’ll find what’s right for you - and you’ll hear a whole lot better.

July 13, 2006: My fifth rebirthday.
Last Sunday, I celebrated my fifth rebirthday. My birthdays have always been disappointing, since they’re on December 26th. But the day I went deaf, July 7th, 2001, triggered extraordinary changes in my life. People often ask me what I felt that day. I was frightened and confused, but even more than that, I felt a marshaling of energies and a heightened sense of aliveness. I suddenly had a goal, to get my hearing back, but I also knew that I also had a chance to start afresh in life. One gets a certain sense of freedom in total disaster, as long as there’s a ray of hope for rebuilding. I had just that, in the cochlear implant. And on the flight home, I thought to myself, “You know, I could write a book about this.” When I got home I went straight to the keyboard. Most of the first six pages of the book was written within a few days.

And now, looking back, I have to laugh in amazement and delight about how far I’ve come. A year and a half after receiving my last paycheck, I’m living in San Francisco and making it as a freelance writer and speaker. I travel all over the country and meet amazing people. And – this just happened this morning – Duke, where I flunked my doctoral orals, has invited me back to give a set of talks in the fall or winter. It’s a sweet triumph. (By the way, I later completed my doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin.)

Both William James and Abraham Maslow say that hardship can focus the mind and raise an individual to previously undreamt-of levels of clarity and performance. They’re the godfathers of the burgeoning field of positive psychology, which studies how people become and stay happy.

Right now, this line of thinking interests me much more than the book I was planning to write, Pros/Thesis (described in the April 22nd, May 14th, and May 30th entries below.) I’ve been a reading maniac the last two weeks, hoovering up books and articles as I develop my ideas. They include:

Chaos; Touching; Attachment Theory; How Brains Make Up Their Minds; Integral Psychology; Neural Darwinism; How People Learn; On Intelligence; Authentic Happiness; The Left Hand of God;A Theory of Everything; and A General Theory of Love.

And the question I’m asking today is, “What is the relationship between oxytocin and learning?”

That’s all very vague, I know, because I don’t want to go into details just yet. But I’ve become convinced that the “set point” theory of happiness, which argues that a person’s feeling of happiness changes very little despite positive and negative life events, is wrong, or at least incomplete. I think it is possible for people to launch themselves, suddenly and unexpectedly, into previously undreamt-of levels of awareness and performance. I want to explore the how and why of it, and the search is taking me into neurology, philosophy, mathematics, evolutionary theory, and spirituality.

There would also be an autobiographical component to the book; in some ways, it’d be a sequel to Rebuilt. My life after I finished it has been every bit as astonishing as what happens in the book.

It may seem like an abrupt shift, but in fact I’ve been thinking in this direction for over two years. I want to write a book that sends waves of hope and optimism into the world. Pros/Thesis would be cranky and contrarian. It’d focus on telling a lot of people that their ideas about the future are wrong, and it’d be fighting obscure political battles. I just don’t feel like writing a book like that.

This doesn’t mean I’m abandoning the niche I’ve built up in bionics and technologies of the body. I’ll still be writing articles on new technologies that help the body. But in a book, I want to think in new and larger directions.
I’m never happier than when I’m on the hunt of grand ideas and seeking a synthesis that unifies them. I’m a bloodhound of a writer, constantly sniffing the ground and following paths that reveal themselves bit by bit.

The life I live now lets me do it. So I celebrate July 7th each year as my rebirthday. I throw a dinner party each year, inviting close friends and people who have been kind to me. Eleven people came over last Sunday, and there was ample food and good conversation. It was a symposium over lasagna. To rebirthdays!

June 25, 2006: Rebuilt , the paperback.
Rebuilt came out in paperback last month — you can see the image above. It’s the same book, just a different cover and subitle. Funny thing, the publisher didn’t include a caption explaining the image cover! That’s me at my preschool graduation in 1970. I went to Summit Speech School, a preschool for deaf children, and in the picture I’m shaking hands with my teacher, who is about to hand me my diploma. I still have that diploma, framed next to my doctoral diploma.

June 20, 2006: Rebuilt, the movie.
As I said, Hollywood came calling. Rebuilt has just been optioned by Kalman Apple and Shameela Bakhsh of Lester Films, which made the Academy Award-nominated Speed for Thespians a few years back. What the deal means is that Lester Films now has the right to pitch and finance a film based on my book. I’m excited about the deal and am looking forward to seeing the process unfold.

Who’ll play me? I vote for Edward Norton, though of course the casting is entirely up to Kalman and Shameela. But the really big question is, who’s going to play Elvis, my cat?

N.B. My friend Kemble Scott, author of the forthcoming novel SOMA (Kensington, 2007), emailed me to tell me there’s a word for authors fantasizing about who’d play their characters: casturbation.

June 17, 2006: For me, Boléro; for Josh Swiller, American Idol.
Deaf men writing about music, Act II: here’s Josh Swiller’s gorgeous essay on listening to American Idol with his cochlear implant. “Her voice, honeyed and low, filled the studio and lifted it off its foundations to some moonbeamed place.” It’s the perfect bookend to my own article published six months earlier, My Bionic Quest for Boléro (Wired, November 2005.) Josh’s article has striking parallels to my own, and why not? we’ve had parallel experiences. Still, Josh has a lunatic poetic sense of humor that I will never in a million years be able to match. You gotta read the article. And once you do that, pitch on over to Cochbla, Josh’s wonderful blog.

June 12, 2006: A new audio interview with me
A few days ago the podcast show AfterTV released an audio interview with me, conducted by Andrew Keen. Listen here.

June 3, 2006: The real reason why men and women are different…
It’s out! My buddy Joe Quirk’s book, Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women: The Real Reason Why Men and Women Are Different was launched last week. I read this book in manuscript three years ago, and could not stop laughing. Even Joe’s chapter titles make me laugh. Here’s a couple:

• Why You’re So Horny
• Why You Like Spielberg More Than T.S. Eliot
• Faked Orgasms Fool Men, But Real Orgasms Fool Women
• You Don’t Have An Orgasm. An Orgasm Has You.
• When Your Wife Sleeps With Your Brother, and You’re Okay With That

And how could we miss this one?

• March of The Penguin Prostitutes

Joe’s humor is everywhere. Like here…

In Case You Think I’m Full of It: Bibliography

and here…

People Who Deserve Acknowledgement But Not Payment

I’m in that last section (woo hoo!) I assure you, even though Joe and his lovely wife Heather feed me regularly and listen to my philosophical ramblings, I am not biased: this is a great book. I hope you go buy it.

May 30, 2006: The politics of Pros/Thesis.
Rebuilt has gotten one negative review so far, in an essay titled “The Rhetoric of Extinction” in The New Atlantis. To me it’s more valuable than any of the 23 positive reviews I’ve got. It was a political review, and it gave me an “aha” moment. It made me realize that Pros/Thesis needs to have a strong political angle.

Politics? Of bionic body parts? Follow along and you’ll see.

Let’s look at the review. Charles Rubin, a professor at Duquesne University, reviewed four books in the essay: Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution, Ramez Naam’s More Than Human, James Hughes’ Citizen Cyborg, and my own Rebuilt.

Rubin felt that all four books expressed an “anything goes” morality with respect to bodily enhancement, along with a blithe disregard of the fact that the technology could be used for ill as well as good. He saw us as expressing a “rhetoric of extinction” where, “faced with the inadequacies of human life, we are promised something better—and told that resistance is probably futile.”

Extinction? Rubin thinks so. He thinks that if Humanity 1.0 was replaced by Humanity 2.0, that would count as extinction rather than evolution. However, the prospect of actual extinction doesn’t worry Rubin too much, because he doesn’t consider it likely to begin with. What he’s really worked up about is an extinction of values. Once science gives us everything we want, a cauldron of unholy loves awaits us:

To the rhetoric of extinction, questioning the results of free choice is a rejection of liberty. But it is an old observation that liberty degenerates into license if it means anything goes. Transhumanists did not create our contemporary forgetfulness of virtues and vices, our eroded standards of comportment, our debunking of moral excellence, and our culture of immediate gratification. The rhetoric of extinction did not create the conditions of our society that help turn liberty into license. But its relentless focus on individually defined satisfaction depends on and accelerates these moral and cultural trends.

Look at all those hot-button words – “degenerate”, “license”, “forgetfulness”, “virtue”, “vice”, “eroded”, “comportment”, and most of all, “moral”. And this, a little earlier in the essay: “…too much control of our bodies, treating them as mere objects of the will, might in fact facilitate something once called sin.”

Interesting assortment of words there. Stripped to their basics, here are Rubin’s grounding assumptions:

There Should Be Limits, Because There Should Be Limits.
Uncontrolled Desire Is Bad and Scary.
Humans Should Not Aspire To Godlike Status, Or Punishment Will Ensue.
If We Don’t Stop It, Technology Will Lead To Nightmares.
Playing With The Body Is Icky.

Could Rubin be politically conservative? You think? His bio page shows that he has received fellowships from the John M. Olin Foundation and the Scaife Foundation (through the Carthage Foundation), among others; these are far right-wing organizations and major funders of the Republican Party.

Rubin’s not the only conservative who talks like this about technologies of the body. Check this out, from Leon Kass’s 1985 book Toward a More Natural Science:

We, on the other hand, with our dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, “wanted” children, “rights over our bodies,” sexual liberation, and other practices and beliefs that insist on our independence and autonomy, live more and more wholly for the here and now, subjugating everything we can to the exercise of our wills, with little respect for the nature and meaning of bodily life.

So having independence and autonomy over one’s body entails having little respect for the meaning of life – how’s that? It follows, somehow, if you’re conservative, and Kass is. Since 1985 he’s moved up in the world, and is now the head of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, which has endorsed limitations on stem-cell research, among other things. (Kass’s politics have been nicely dissected here.) We see the same sense of moody distaste in neocon Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future. To Fukyama, the prospect of modifying human bodies threatens “human dignity” (he devotes an entire chapter to the idea.)

There’s an equation shaping up here: “Conservative ideology = fear and distaste at the prospect of remaking the human body.” From reading these guys, it’s clear that it’s based primarily on emotional grounds. They don’t make reasoned arguments. Instead, they repeat hot-button words over and over again in the belief that they will add up to an argument. In an article on Kass’ work, Virginia Postrel summed it up: “This isn’t about the 21st century. It’s about the 16th.”

Now that we have some idea where Rubin is coming from, let’s look at his take on my book. He says I ascribe my moral growth, as it unfolds over the course of the book, to the technology in my head rather than my life experiences and innate horse sense.

Given his sensible inclinations and the fact that life crises (such as his suddenly worsened deafness) can alter the shape of anyone’s life, we are entitled to wonder why it is so important for him to see himself as a cyborg rather than as a human being whose life is enriched by a new tool. Is this really the deepest reservoir of self-knowledge and moral wisdom available to him in modern times? Or does the self-creation and open-endedness he associates with being a cyborg appeal to him precisely because he lacks the intellectual tools to reflect on the constraining elements of a moral life?

Notice, first of all, the rhetorical questions. Rubin asks 16 such rhetorical questions in the essay without answering them. When you see this kind of prose consistently, it’s a red flag that the writer is being lazy: substituting the lubricious pleasure of sonority for the hard work of reasoned argument. It’s not the “deepest reservoir”, because I do write about myself as a human being whose life is enriched by a new tool. And self-creation and open-endedness are not incompatible with living a moral life. Rubin assumes that morality must be externally imposed by “constraint” — a classic conservative assumption. It’s a catastrophic error. All of the blood and grief visited on New York and Iraq has been caused by people who believe in that kind of morality.

However, Rubin does make one reasonable criticism. I did spend too much time on the idea of the cyborg, which I now realize is based on a dated science-fiction fantasy of spiritual abnegation. It simply makes no sense to label a person a “cyborg.” It’s like labeling someone a “Fiat” because of the car they drive. Computational body parts have no agency apart from their programming. It’s not what they do to you that counts, it’s what you do with them. Ultimately, I dismissed the concept and the fantasy, ending up with a skeptical perspective that actually has much in common with Rubin’s.

Where we differ is on the fact that technology enables freedom and self-construction. I embrace it. Rubin fears it. The essay isn’t driven so much by reason as by a manifest distaste for the very idea of the transformation of human bodies. Rubin might as well have said, “If th’ body we have war good’nuf fer mah granddaddy, it b’good’nuf fer me.” He writes, “Promised that technology will satisfy our desires and free us of ‘master narratives,’ we find ourselves at the mercy of our own unconstrained desires and potentially subject to our neighbors’ more powerfully restless wills.” But that’s right-wing fearmongering rather than reality. In 1985 Kass railed against technologies that are now accepted conventions, but the dreaded future where Life is Meaningless has not arrived. Just the opposite. For example, people who change gender don’t do it on a whim; they do it after years of soul-searching and tremendous suffering, and it requires immense courage. Some of the profoundest memoirs of the last five years have been written by people who went through that process. The technology gave them the chance to become more fully themselves.

Rubin’s fearful attitude is seen most clearly in his essay’s title. He assumes that improving the human body entails the extinction of the unimproved. But that isn’t the way technological adoption works. While some, like Kurzweil, believe in an oncoming Singularity where everything changes all of a sudden, I don’t see that happening. There isn’t going to be a day where we suddenly wake up in The Future. To echo William Gibson, the future is always already here, arriving in bits and pieces. Today’s children are smarter and taller than their parents, who were smarter and taller than their parents. That doesn’t mean that the generation born in the 1930s is being driven into extinction. It’s simply being replaced, one person at a time.

I think the highest duty of life is to bequeath something better than itself to the future. That used to take place by variation and natural selection. The process of evolution accelerated a thousandfold with the invention of language and technology. Now it’s set to move even faster as fundamental changes to the human body and genome become possible. That will take longer than the techno-optimists think. The body is formidably complex and integrated, and it can’t be improved the way one would remodel a kitchen. We are just beginning. As I said in my book, compared to normal hearing, the device I have in my head is like fixing a spiderweb with yarn. It will take decades of basic research, and more decades of trial and error. Yet I think it will come. We should embrace that future with courage and hope, not reactionary fear.

May 14, 2006: The thesis of Pros/Thesis.
As I noted in an earlier entry, I finally shipped my book proposal off to my agent, with a working title of Pros/Thesis. The title implies that the book is about prostheses, and that it has a thesis – that it isn’t simply going to trundle the reader through a tour of the latest advances in bionic body parts.

Here’s the thesis: that we’ll see an increasing abstraction in how we think about bodies, including our own, as implantable computers gradually become entrusted with monitoring or running body functions.

What do I mean by “abstraction”? Consider an example. My implant sends about one million bits per second of data to my inner ear. In principle, it could be stored on a hard drive and searched for patterns. Say I want to know how much time I spend talking rather than listening. (Some people with hearing loss have an unfortunate tendency to talk too much in a conversation, since when they’re talking, they’re in control. I’ve trained myself to resist that, but how well am I really doing?) It wouldn’t be that hard to analyze the datastream, since my voice has a distinctive loudness and frequency range.

Now this example might seem far-fetched. Who would actually take the time to engage in that kind of self-analysis? But a similar focus on physical exercise would have been inconceivable 100 years ago, when most people did physical labor for a living. Now people obsess about exercise and collect all sorts of physical data on their performance.

But abstracting the body would be new, because it is the one remaining domain of life that computers have not changed at all. You’re sitting at your computer reading this with essentially the same body your ancestors had 100,000 years ago.

There’s a handy term that sums up that kind of abstraction: informating. I’ve borrowed the word from Shoshana Zuboff, who pointed out that computers didn’t just automate old kinds of work; they made new kinds of work possible. Computers allowed the workers at a paper mill to monitor readouts on a screen instead of smelling the pulp and listening to the boilers. That had drawbacks – they lost touch with the nitty-gritty of the process – but it also enabled them to optimize the system for efficiency. They went from being physical laborers to being information workers, and Zuboff shows how wrenching and profound that transition was. It was a whole new way of looking at the factory.

Bionics may similarly enable the informating of the body. At present, your body is completely invisible to the global network. What would life be like if that changed? What if your vision, hearing, pain and pleasure sensations, and so on, were visible to the network the way your computer is now? That’s the question Pros/Thesis will try to answer.

There are some unsolved issues holding Pros/Thesis back. I’m skeptical that people will take the risks of putting implants into healthy organs for the purpose of recording and augmentation. Enormous leaps would have to be made in medical technology to make that feasible. But there are some signs on the horizon of such things becoming possible, in unexpected ways.

Now to see what my agent thinks.

May 5, 2006: Boléro on the BBC.
After Cory Doctorow wrote about my Boléro piece in his blog Boing Boing, lots of good things happened, including that the BBC invited me to read an abridged version of the story for their show “Music Matters” in London. The show is airing at 5:45pm in London this coming Sunday the 14th. It’ll be available on the BBC’s website, here. It’ll continue to be available for a week after airdate.

Reading the story on the air was quite an experience. In the London studio, Paul Frankl, the producer, kept pushing me to read with greater clarity and emphasis, so I found myself reading the story in a completely different way than I’ve ever spoken. I hope you’ll all tune in.

May 4, 2006: Back in the USA.
I’m home! My overseas trip was wonderfully successful, with 14 radio interviews, one TV interview, three print interviews, two speaking gigs, and at least one book review forthcoming in the Times of London. Hard to believe it all happened in one week.

I finished a new book proposal (working title: Pros/Thesis) and sent it to my agent this afternoon. I spent a good deal of the 10-hour flight home working on it. Yes, my ideas came together — I hope! But I’m too tired to write about it right now.

April 26, 2006: I’m on BBC Breakfast Television tomorrow morning.
It should air the morning of the 27th between 8:40 and 8:55 London time. I’ve done 13 other interviews so far, mostly on local BBC stations, with more to come. London’s great. I got away from the whirlwind for a few hours so I could ride the London Eye — a 450-foot ferris wheel by the Thames with glass pods big enough to hold 20 or 30 people — and tour the reconstructed Globe, built in 1997 after the original was torn down in 1642. I did my master’s in Shakespearean drama and read 34 of his 37 plays. To see his theater rebuilt all fresh and new was a tremendous thrill. I couldn’t stop looking around and smiling, and imagining what he would have made of the place.

It’s not quite the same, of course. The thatched roof has a sprinkler system built into it, the floor where the groundlings stand is concrete instead of dirt, and there are perfectly modern bathrooms in the tourist center next door. And scholars had to do quite a bit of guessing about how it was painted inside. But the place felt great: it felt just the right size and shape; the guide said that voices carried wonderfully inside it. It wasn’t just a pious reconstruction. It was a great little theater. The Globe!

April 23, 2006: Paris on a bike: wheeeee.
The bike tour was wonderfully fun. I went to the south leg of the Eiffel Tower, where I was told the tourguide would be waiting with a sign saying “Fat Tire Bicycle Tours.” And indeed he was. He was a young fellow who’d just graduated from Texas A&M, and he was doing exactly what you’d expect: kicking around in Paris while waiting to start his first real job. The Eiffel Tower loomed above us, with thousands of people milling around waiting in lines, and guards pointedly holding submachine guns. Nice. Thirteen other people showed up, and we followed the guide like ducklings to the office. I picked out a bike named “Soho” and we were off, wobbling and trying not to crash into each other. I think the company’s motto should be “Surprisingly Few Accidents.”

The day was bright and sunny, the air was a perfect 70, and we were were all eager as puppies to charge into Paris. There is something insanely fine about gliding through parks on a spring day on a bike. We zipped along treelined bike paths, bumped up and down through intersections, and dodged pedestrians (who smiled at us). I kept standing up on my pedals to enjoy the feeling of being tall and fast. Among our stops was the Hotel des Invalides, built to house injured soldiers. The guide told us how he watched the riots there a few weeks ago over changes to the employment laws. “People were overturning cars, policemen with truncheons were beating people up – I’ve never seen anything like it. It was pretty cool.” We crossed the Seine on the Pont Alexandre III, and picked up speed as we descended on the Place de la Concorde. That will probably be my main memory of Paris: racing past a 3200-year old obelisk stolen from the Egyptians and thinking, Wheeee.

I didn’t encounter the famed Parisian snootiness at all. Everyone I talked to was friendly and happy to help. Maybe there’s a secret niceness campaign going on. Or maybe I just did things right. I’d say, Bonjour, Mademoiselle, parlez-vous anglais? with a grin and a tone of voice that implied, We’re all tourists on this planet, if you think about it.

I didn’t think about Book II at all. No revelations sprung fully-formed. But then, neither did Paris. One can’t rush such things. Ideas are slowly coalescing. I’ll talk about them soon.

April 22, 2006: Meandering Paris, and Book II.
Walking around Paris is like being a writer. There’s no obvious path to anywhere.

Yesterday I meandered Paris and thought about Book II. It’s not that I paid attention to Paris in some moments and thought about the book in other moments. The two activities ran in parallel, reinforcing each other. I had no plan in mind except to walk; promising streets sometimes didn’t pan out; the map seemed to have only vague connections to reality; I kept getting lost; and the whole enterprise was exuberant with beauty and confusion.

And that’s exactly what concieving a book feels like. I’ve written my way into dead ends twice now. I spent six weeks writing a proposal for a book titled Love and Revolution, which would have been about sexuality and politics, and my agent said “ehh” and my editor said “no.” I backed up, which is to say, I spent a month doing nothing. Then I spent four weeks on Coming to Our Senses, which would have described various bionic sensory organs and argued that technology is increasingly making us feel less happy by mediating our access to the world. I realized that I was trying to write two separate and unrelated books, and that I didn’t want to try to convince people that they are less happy than their great-grandparents. (On top of that, I discovered in the airport bookstore that the title was already taken, by Jon Kabat-Zinn.)

Stuck, then. I walked to the Musee d’Orsay asking myself, “What can I write?” When I got there I realized that I didn’t want to be indoors. The day was lushly gorgeous, humid and hazy, inviting expansive sallies rather than bounded probings. I wanted distance! Yet any direction, every direction, was a risk: it might be boring, and cost me a fascinating discovery the next block over. I turned south, because it looked more foodlike. Nope. Only overpriced touristy restaurants, and blocks of banks and clothing stores.

Dead-ended, in writing and in life. Yet the mazy little streets made me want to keep walking. Paris built itself up in layers over thousands of years, so each street is full of happy little complexities and accidents. I turned east, lured by the promise of greenery. As I walked it occurred to me that I don’t think about cochlear implants, retinal implants, and spinal cord stimulators in abstract ways. When I hear about how spinal cord stimulators block pain, I think about how similar their software is to the code that runs my ear. When I think about retinal implants I think of the advice I gave to a researcher at USC who is working on 60-electrode devices that should go into clinical trials at the end of the year. She told me she’d be surprised if the patients saw much more than basic shapes. “Oh, no,” I told her. “They’ll see much more than you expect. They’ll learn how to move their heads to get more information. They’ll learn to match up visual patterns with events. You think you’re just sending them data. But they’ll figure out the meanings.”

I wasn’t speaking as a scientist. I was speaking as a deaf person with 16 electrodes in my left ear. To me the field of neurotechnology is inescapably personal; I view it from my perspective as a user. I can bring that perspective to a book, I thought to myself. I don’t have be objective. I can be blunt about debunking dumb ideas, like the hope that implants will someday enable superhuman hearing and vision. (If you had the ability to hear a whisper at 500 feet, you’d also hear every sound within 500 feet. It would be overwhelming. I have a sensitivity dial that I can crank up to maximum, which enables me to hear sounds as faint as 10dB, but I never use it. In fact, in noisy environments I turn the sensitivity dial way down, because it improves the signal-to-noise ratio.) I can talk about real-world issues like power limitations and cost limitations. I can talk about the scientists I’ve gotten to know.

And I’ve got a bank of knowledge about the senses built up over 41 years of being acutely aware of missing one of them. My mind is full of happy little complexities and accidents. Like Paris. I walked down the Rue de Babylone and made my way to the Rue de Vaugirard, which led me to the Palais du Luxembourg. I discovered it was a vast estate with walking paths and a central pool. Hundreds of people were lounging in chairs by the water, many of them reading books. I turned north and found myself in the gloomy cathedral of St. Sulpice, which figured prominently in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I kept walking north, more interested in the quirky and particular than the immensities of monuments. And then I began to discover the Paris of cafes and bakeries around the Rue de Seine. Every street had three or four sidewalk cafes filled to capacity with people chattering and smoking. Tiny little two-seater cars put-putted the streets. I bought a pastry for the equivalent of about $3.75, which made feel like rioting over the cost of bread, a Parisian tradition. The dollar is ominously weak. By now the sunlight was slanting low from the west, making the beige 18th-century walls glow with a golden light.

But here’s the difference between walking Paris and writing a book: most readers will allow only so much meandering in a book. I can make much of the specificity of my experience, but a good book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As I turned a sharp corner onto the Rue de Clement I asked myself, “What’s the argument? What’s the story arc?” These are two different things. The argument is the point of the book. The story arc is how that argument is unfolded over successive chapters.

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten in writing this. Now, the next morning, I’m on the Rue de Seine at 9:30am, 6th arrondisement I think, walking about as the markets and cafes open. (Well, at this exact moment I’m perching on a marble block writing this, looking like Rodin’s The Thinker with a laptop.) I’m thinking of going on the Fat Tire tour, which is on bikes – I saw them go by on the Seine and it looks like a friendly young crowd. Story arcs = guided tours: maybe the tour will also give me my argument and story arc. More to come.

April 19, 2006: I’m going to the UK!
I’ll be promoting the release of my book in the United Kingdom. I’ll appear at the three events listed on the Events page, and also on various radio shows, including BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Leiceister, BBC Radio Merseyside, Saga Radio Nottingham, and Saga Radio Glasgow. Needless to say, I’m excited about it all.

April 2, 2006: I’m anthologized.
My Wired essay, My Bionic Quest for Boléro, has been selected for THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2006, to be published this September by Ecco/HarperCollins and Perennial. Cool.

March 28, 2006: How not to panic about device failures.
Yesterday I got an email from a parent anxious about a letter they’d gotten from Advanced Bionics.

Our two-year-old son has bilateral neurosensorial hearing loss and has had a Clarion HiRes for 14 months now. Just today, we got a letter from AB warning that our son’s implant is part of a batch identified as having a higher probable failure rate (25/1000 as opposed to the better batch, at 5/1000). Thankfully, all is well right now. I am writing to you for any insight and/or hard information that you might have, through your contacts at AB or in the community, that might help us cope with the anxiety of re-implantation. Is there any research on hearing/speech perception following re-implantation in kids? etc… Any information or opinion from you is appreciated.

Here’s what I wrote back.

“I’m sorry you got a letter that distresses you. However, keep in mind how low that number is. 25 out of 1000 = a 4% chance of device failure. That means a 96% chance that nothing bad at all will happen.

Ninety-six percent. My advice to you is to file this under “things that probably won’t happen and can’t do anything about in any case” and serenely go on with your life. If your child’s auditory performance changes abruptly, then you’ll take him to the audiologist and see what happens next.

If the device does fail, the data from studies of reimplantation show that users do as well, or better, with new devices as they did with the old ones. Here are the conclusions from two studies published in 2001:

(1) Results indicated that postoperative performance was either equal to or better than scores before failure. None of the devices explanted caused damage that precluded the implantation of the same or an upgraded device. These findings support the efficacy and safety of internal implant designs as related to the maintenance of a functional cochlea for the purpose of reimplantation. CONCLUSIONS: Cochlear reimplantation can be performed safely and without decrement to performance. (Full reference)

(2) Open-set speech recognition scores and speech perception abilities remained stable or improved compared with results before reimplantation. CONCLUSION: Our results confirm that cochlear implant reimplantation is technically feasible and allows for continued auditory development for the child who has a cochlear implant device failure. (Full reference)

Let me add one tip. An abrupt change in auditory performance can be caused by many things, most of them very simple and easily fixed. A few months ago, my processor started “cutting out” - that is, abruptly going silent for a few seconds, coming back on, then going silent again. The reason? The cable going from the processor to the headpiece was wearing out. A day and $28 later, I had a new cable and all was well.

To give you another example, at one point I started hearing intermittent clicking sounds. When I changed the batteries, it often – but not always – went away. Naturally, I began to worry that it might be an internal issue. Finally I bought one of those super dri-aid kits and dried everything out, including the batteries. The clicking stopped immediately. Later on I sat in a hot tub with the BTE on, and within ten minutes, the clicking started again. Proof positive! It was a humidity effect. It had been solved with a $50 electric dri-aid kit.

The moral of the story is, never leap to the worst possible conclusion. A sudden problem is far likelier to be caused by a $28 cable than by the failure of the internal device.

Rest easy. And give my very best wishes to your son.”

March 20, 2006: One day in a writer’s life.
Today is an ordinary, exuberant day. I found “The Complete New Yorker” on my doorstep, a treasure trove of four thousand issues on eight DVDs. Four thousand issues! I looked up a profile I’d loved, “The Chinos’ Artful Harvest” (Mark Singer, November 30, 1992). It’s about the Chino family’s expertise in growing produce on their small farm near San Diego. Singer quotes Wolfgang Puck as saying, “Whatever it costs me to buy from them, it doesn’t matter…I just know they grow it and I want it.” Singer’s got a wonderfully droll way of depicting their offbeat speech and mannerisms, but it’s clear that they’re the best in the country at growing celeriac, fennel, rappini, Chinese long beans, Vietnamese coriander, mibuna, mizuna, and a hundred other spectacularly obscure vegetables. I love reading about expertise.

Then I went to the corner pet store to buy a new litterbox. I discovered that litter has evolved in the past ten years. They now sell plasticky litter that supposedly superabsorbs, so of course I had to buy some. Elvis came over and watched closely as I set it up. “It’s a major advance in the technology of poop,” I told him as I poured it into the box. He equably crawled into it and expressed his approval by using it. When you’re a cat, a new litterbox is an exciting thing.

Hollywood came calling; a long phone conversation ensued. I can’t say more than that about it right now.

And then I worked on two projects: a proposal for my second book, which will be about the senses, and an article I’m writing for other magazine, on what it feels like to be happy. That’s an extraordinary sensation for me: the feeling of being happy. It’s lasted for five months now, so I’ve concluded that it’s not a passing mood. One line of the article is, “I keep poking about in my new spirit in wonder – it’s as if someone broke into my apartment while I was away and replaced my ratty old couch, painted the walls, and filled the fridge with lasagna and wine.”

That’s what I’m writing about these days.

March 6, 2006: My brother is a dad!
I’m thrilled to announce the birth of Giselle Tavi Chorost, to my brother Dan Chorost and his wife Sabrina Tavi, two hours ago. Welcome to the world, Giselle!

March 4, 2006: Light in a dark chamber.
On May 18th, if all goes well, I will get a cochlear implant in my right ear. The decision is a bittersweet one. It means embracing new powers, but it also means saying goodbye to possible futures that I had hoped to see.

I take so much pleasure in the performance of my implanted left ear, which I’ve had for 4½ years now. When I descend the escalator in San Francisco’s Muni stations I effortlessly pick up the PA announcements. “Outbound. J car. In two minutes.” Then I know, without rushing or hunting for signs, that the train I need will show up in a moment. I take a nifty pleasure out of that, the simple joy of being multimodal.

And when I was cross-country skiing at Yosemite last weekend, the woman behind me said, “You okay?” as I wobbled along, working out the rhythms of gliding on snow. I said, “Yep.” Just like that. No repeats, no straining. I use cellphones; I do radio call-in shows; I go to parties and people don’t even realize I’m deaf; I talk to drivers from the back seat. I hear, I act, I respond.

However, I don’t always do as well as that. I still battle cappucino machines in cafes and lift my eyebrows in a hm? to ask for repeats. And there are inherent limitations in having only one ear. A big one is that I can’t localize sound. When a sound comes from one’s left, it reaches the right ear a fraction of a second later, enabling the brain to triangulate its direction. But since I have only one functioning ear, I have no idea where sirens or car horns are coming from. If I’m walking, I have to stop dead and wait until something comes into view. And of course, when I’m driving, I can only look around as best I can – and guess.

It hurts me professionally, too. When I teach I can’t tell where my students’ voices are coming from, forcing me to rubberneck until I find who’s speaking. I sometimes lose several seconds doing that and apologetically have to ask a student to start over. When I was teaching writing classes last fall at the University of San Francisco I tried to train my students to cue me by raising a hand, but it inevitably turned into permission to speak. I got good evaluations at semester’s end – well above the school average, in fact – but it was annoying.

In the winter of 2005 I made an appointment with Dr. Roberson, my surgeon. I said to him, “I think it’s time to consider going bilateral.”

How much better are two ears than one? It’s like asking how much better two eyes are. You can do a lot with one eye. You have the same resolving power, and the same color vision. But depth perception is harder, and your field of view is smaller. Having two eyes isn’t exactly twice as good as having one, but it provides that crucial extra edge when you need it. It would be the same, I think, in auditory environments. When talking to one person in a quiet place, I usually get 9 out of 10 words. At parties, speaking one-on-one, I get perhaps 6 out of 10 words, which is more than good enough. Speech is astonishingly redundant. It’s really quite easy for me to skate over the surface of a person’s speech, lift out what I need, and interpolate the rest. But small groups in quiet rooms are far harder, because speech darts from every direction and overlaps. Not being able to localize puts me at a huge disadvantage, and I’m doing well if I get 2 words out of 10. But if a second ear raised my performance to 5 words out of 10, ah! I’m back in Interpolation City. Even a small improvement could enable me to move up to a whole new level of performance.

But there were several major issues to consider, all of them unnerving.

It could cripple me, for one thing. The cochlea controls both hearing and balance. After I went deaf in the left ear in 2001, I was dizzy for three years. My balance system had slowly recovered. But was it because my right ear had taken over? If so, I could be inviting trouble by doing surgery on it. I could be left with a condition called oscilloscopia, a complete inability to walk or even stand.

Dr. Roberson thought not. New electrode arrays had recently come out that made the surgery even safer than it was in 2001, he told me. And we both knew that I had felt no additional dizziness after the surgery on my left ear. It had not affected my balance at all. That was a good sign, but I still felt uneasy.

And that wasn’t the only issue. I asked, “Does this close off possibilities of hair cell regeneration?”

Hair cell regeneration is the holy grail of deafness research. When you talk of hair cell regeneration you are talking of cure, not of prosthesis. If the body can be persuaded to regrow the tiny hairs inside the cochlea that vibrate to sound, deafness will go the way of polio. Cochlear implants will become museum pieces.

But not necessarily my cochlear implants. Dr. Roberson reminded me that the cochlea spins a sheath of fibrous scar tissue around the electrode array. It has the positive function of holding the array firmly in place. It has the negative one of leaving no room for hair cells to grow. Getting implanted in both ears could end my hopes of normal hearing. I’d thought of someday chronicling that experience. I’d even picked out a title: Renewed, to be a companion volume to Rebuilt. But doing this meant that Renewed would never be written.

We talked of timeframes for such research. There was a breakthrough in 2005 when scientists succeeded in regrowing hair cells in mice. But that appears to be the easy part. Making nerve fibers attach themselves to the new hair cells is much more difficult. It might be possible in ten or fifteen years. And it would take more years beyond that for the FDA to approve it, and still more for insurance coverage for the procedure to become standard. Decades.

For years I’ve had dreams of walking into the operating room to have the other ear done, and in all of them I was asking myself, “What am I doing here? When did I agree to this?” In the dreams I felt frightened, as if the medical system had glided me to that point without my ever committing to it. I wasn’t ready to accept that alien device into my own body and make it truly mine. Not yet ready to spin the scar tissue of my spirit around it, making us into a cybernetic whole that would not come undone.

“I can always cancel,” I thought to myself as I walked down to the admin’s office, my datebook in hand. “I’m just creating the possibility. They can’t drag me into the operating room.”

The conversation in the admin’s office went like this.

“April 13th?”

Flip flip. “Can’t. I’m at a conference in Colorado.” Invited there because someone had heard a talk I’d given on brain implants.

“April 20th?”

“I’ll be in London.” Speaking to the British Cochlear Implant Group and doing interviews to publicize my book in the UK.

“May 25th?”

“Sorry. I need to be at Stanford three days later.” Addressing a conference on medical ethics.

I couldn’t help smiling. This conversation showed how successfully I had rebuilt my life. I’d become enough of an authority on medical devices that I barely had time to get one of my own.

“May 18th?”

I considered my calendar. It fit in between my trip to Chicago (where I’m on an advisory board on auditory research) and the Stanford talk. But I’d have to reschedule a talk on May 20th. Maybe I could show up pale and gripping the lectern, just to show how tough and brave I was.

Maybe not.

“All right,” I said. “May 18th.”

She tapped away on her keyboard. I carefully wrote into my calendar, “CI surgery – 7:30 am.” Just like that. Just another appointment.

But what about my balance system? I had it tested. They put goggles on my head with miniature infrared cameras that tracked the motion of my eyes. When you get dizzy your eyes roll, providing an accurate index of what the balance system is doing. The audiologist swiveled my head and blew cold and warm air into my ears. I felt only mild dizziness. I cheerfully chatted with the audiologist about TV shows during the test. I walked out feeling sure that my results were in the normal range in both ears, and I was right. After I got home I stood on one foot, closed my eyes, started counting, and got as far as thirty. Even a lot of normally hearing people can’t do that.

Since then I’ve let the idea moil in my head. I’m 41. In 2016 I’ll be 51; in 2021, I’ll be 56. But my life starts now, today. I want to hear better in class in September 2006, not September 2016. Ten, fifteen, even twenty more years struggling, in the hope of a technology that may not even emerge? It seems reasonable to take the best I can have now, and accept both the inevitable regrets and unexpected opportunities. Hair-cell regeneration may not be the only future option. Perhaps someday it’ll become possible to replace one or both ears with a 128-electrode device. Or perhaps nanobots will be injected into my inner ear that will industriously disassemble the scar tissue and deposit it in a fine molecular powder in my ear canal, where I’ll swab it out with a Q-Tip. Maybe I will someday get to write Renewed.

Given the same opportunity, other people will choose differently. I gave a talk at a private high school in Atherton in February and a student with an implant shyly introduced herself afterward. I was surprised; I’d had no idea from her speech. I asked her if she was considering a second ear, and she said no. But the calculus of her life is different than mine. She’s what, 15? 16? If she gets normal hearing by 25 or 30, she still has decades to reap the benefits of having waited.

She could, though, with equal justice decide that her college years are so crucial that she should have two ears now. It depends on her temperament and her wants. It depends on the influence of her parents, her friends, her audiologist.

And there is the not inconsiderable factor of sheer chance. At a sporting-goods store last week a woman said to me, “How do you like your implant?” She was behind me, addressing me unexpectedly. I turned around, giving her in that one motion everything she needed to know. Her sister, she told me, had gotten one and not done well. I nodded sympathetically and dug out my card. She glanced at it and said, “Oh, did I hear you on NPR?” I said yes. We exchanged a few sentences. She tucked the card away. She may pass it on to her sister, or to a friend of a friend, and who knows what will come of that? I would never have gotten a cochlear implant had I not abruptly lost the rest of my hearing. Things happen; strangers meet in stores; books and magazines may fall that young woman’s way, bearing information that changes everything.

My worries about my balance system have faded. I trust in the robustness of my body, I trust Advanced Bionics to make me a good solid device that performs to spec, and I trust my surgeon to thread it precisely where it should go and nowhere else. My choice of a second Advanced Bionics device is not, by the way, an endorsement in and of itself, though I’ve been very satisfied with the Clarion CII in my left ear. If I got a Cochlear or Med-El device instead, that’d be a different mapping process for each ear, and two sets of batteries to manage. Forget it.

For years my right-side inner ear has been a sealed cavern — a dark and silent place where years on end have slowly passed. Its living nerves wait patiently for signals that never come. But on May 18th the scala tympani in my cochlea will be rigged for electricity, and on June 5th my new right ear will be activated. The initial burst of electricity, I’m told, blows off the proteins that settle on the electrodes after the surgery. Then megabytes upon megabytes of data will pour in. It will be the biggest surprise those nerves have ever had. That day, a dark chamber will be flooded with light.

March 3, 2006: Studio 360 interviews me.
The day after Christmas, Studio 360 interviewed me on a chilly day in Manhattan. The show’s just come out. Listen here.

February 8, 2006: Can stem-cell therapies cure deafness?
On Tuesday the 6th I covered The International Symposium on Stem Cell Collaboration in San Francisco for The Scientist, a journal that covers the life sciences. I went with a mission: to find out if stem-cell research holds out hope for curing deafness. Along the way I saw San Francisco’s mayor, found that venture capitalists don’t take risks, and quite to my surprise, learned about plans for returning to the moon. Read my report.

February 7, 2006: Two new radio interviews.
Barbara Bogaev and Bill Radke interview me on Weekend America (RealAudio), and R.U. Sirius and Sherry Miller on MondoGlobo (MP3).

January 31, 2006: Cats DO watch television.
Normally I write about hearing on my website, but this story is too good not to tell. My cat, Elvis, has become a TV watcher. (Readers of my book know Elvis well from pages 40, 55, 58-9, 82, and 193-95.)

When I visited my dad in Tarrytown, New York, I found a VHS tape labeled “Cat Adventure Video” on his bookshelf.

“Dad, what’s this?”

“Nature scenes. Mice, birds, gerbils. Our cats love it.”

“Your cats actually watch it?”

He insisted that they did. I didn’t believe it. In my experience, cats ignored mirrors and televisions. They didn’t seem to get two-dimensional representations of living things. They lived in the 21st century, but they weren’t of it.

“Can I borrow this?”

“Sure.”

So I took it back to San Francisco, deposited Elvis in front of the TV, and hit PLAY. When a scene of birds clustering around a birdfeeder came on, Elvis ignored it. So much for that.

But the introducer had said that it helped to bring the cats close to the TV. What the heck. I dragged a footrest up to the TV and put Elvis on it. Nothing happened. His head swiveled around and he made to get off the footstool.

So I decided to help him get the point. I held his head toward the TV screen so that it filled his visual field. He squirmed a little bit. Five seconds…ten seconds…

And then he suddenly locked on. I felt his body grow intent and poised. No more head swiveling. Those are BIRDS! There are birds in there! This is FASCINATING!

I let go of him and stood back, and there he was, watching TV. He cocked his head and flicked his eyes to and fro as birds flitted on and off the screen. Sometimes he would watch one particular bird for a while.

Then the scene shifted to mice scurrying around a log, and that interested him even more. He reached out and tapped the screen very gingerly, his eyes dark and wide.

A few minutes later the video changed to butterflies. After a few seconds, he looked away and sat down. Butterflies? Who cares about butterflies?

But he was hooked. Now, after a couple of viewings, he watches everything, including the butterflies. When I turn the TV on, he comes by and looks hopefully up at the screen. Faces interest him. He prefers long shots where things stay in one place for a while. He loses interest when ads come on. Good for him. It would be dangerous if he also figured out what credit cards and telephones do.

It’s a big thing for him. It’s a new source of intellectual stimulation. Life as a housecat can be dull sometimes. Now he’s discovered this fascinating box full of animals and people. It cracks me up to watch him alertly watching TV. He’s joined the 21st century. A major leap in cat evolution.

I’ve got to try nature documentaries on him one of these days. What will he think of lions and tigers?

These days he climbs into my lap and we watch TV together, Elvis and me.

January 5, 2006: Hacking my own ear: what would it take?
I was surprised to get 21 emails on my Wired article in just five hours today. What the…? Turns out that Cory Doctorow wrote about the article today in his blog Boing Boing. He wrote,

The story is gripping, fascinating and informative — a template for a tale that I believe will become more and more prevalent in times to come: a person who relies on computerized prosthetics not being satisfied with the features that were included with it out of the box, taking it upon herself to improve it, to extend it, using her own body and perceptions as a labratory for experiments on human perception and performance.

Indeed I wasn’t satisfied with the software I got out of the box, and pushed to improve it. The article’s about that, and so’s my book. It’s an exciting philosophical and personal adventure to try out new software. Thank you, Cory, for spreading the word.

But Cory missed one detail, and it’s worth addressing because it’s been repeated around the blogosphere. He headlined his entry “Deaf hacker rewrites implant-firmware so he can enjoy music again.” However, I didn’t actually rewrite the software. To do that I’d need a degree in electrical engineering, an insider’s knowledge of the code, and an understanding of how electricity interacts with body tissues. If I broke into Advanced Bionics in the dead of night, fired up the computers, hooked up the interface gadgetry to my processor, and started changing code at will, I could cook my inner ear or electrocute myself. Much more likely, my processor would crash and I’d slink out in total humiliation. I’d be deaf until I went back to my audiologist to have the software re-uploaded.

While this is a silly scenario, processors do crash. At preschools for deaf children, an aide has to stand at the bottom of the playground slide and touch each kid as they come down. It’s to prevent static buildup. With some older processor models, a static discharge can wipe out the processor’s settings and the parents have to take the kid back to the audiologist to have her ear rebooted.

My “processor”, by the way, is a device that sits on top of the ear like a hearing aid, with a radio antenna that magnetically sticks to the implant through the skin and sends it data via a radio link. It looks like a hearing aid, but it’s not. Whereas a hearing aid’s output is amplified sound, a cochlear implant processor’s output is data — in my case, about 1.1 megabits per second. A good diagram of one can be found here.

But even without being able to write code themselves, implant users do have a crucial impact on how the code is written. When engineers write new code, they have to test it on implant users to see if it helps them hear better. They also have to find out if implant users like it and can get used to it. To do that they need to recruit articulate users and convince them to offer their time. It’s a highly collaborative process and is integral to how the field makes new advances. When one early pioneer user, Michael Pierschalla, died in 2002, three of the field’s leading scientists honored his life and work with a 15-minute retrospective at a conference. I’ve argued in my book that if cochlear implant researchers ever win a collective Nobel Prize for their work, at least one of those early patients should be named in the award to symbolize the contributions of deaf users.

I’ve already volunteered myself as a guinea pig for such work several times. For the Wired article, I did much the same thing, but with one important difference. I flew to labs around the country with my own agenda — to try out their software specifically with music. Simply by doing that, I think I’ve gotten them to focus on music sooner than they might have otherwise. And I’ve offered very detailed feedback which I hope has been helpful.

And Cory is right that the more control a person can have over his or her prosthesis, the better. I would love it if Advanced Bionics built a gadget that let me change some of my parameters on my own. While I have a lot of control over the device through my audiologist, it’s control that takes weeks and months to unfold and explore. My audiologist and I experiment with various parameters during fitting sessions, and it always frustrates me that we only have a few hours in each session to try to find the best values for 20 or more variables. I would love to have the freedom of playing with them on my own. That would considerably accelerate the process.

But it is possible in principle to hack one’s own implant. I know of one semi-retired electrical engineer who is planning to get an implant. Unlike me, he’s got the skills to build his own external processor and program it. It won’t be a very sophisticated processor compared to the one the company builds, but it’ll probably work in the sense that he’ll hear things with it. He may very well become the first guy in the world to actually build his own processor and actually, really, write software for his own ear.

(Note: Since I posted this entry, Cory has amended his entry to make it more accurate. Thanks very much, Cory.)

December 7: My buddy Joe Quirk reads from his first novel on KQED.
Joe Quirk, who figured prominently in REBUILT, has just read the first chapter of The Ultimate Rush on KQED. The novel is a hoot and a half, and Joe is a terrific reader. “Bomb Deactivator. Crack Dealer. Swat Rifleman. My job will kill you faster than any of these. And it won’t just kill you; it’ll crush you to a pulpy clot on the streets of San Francisco.” Listen to Joe read the first chapter here.

December 4: More stories about me that I can’t read.
I was interviewed by the Swiss paper SonntagZeitung a few days ago and I’m told the story comes out on Sunday, December 11th. The web version of the article will be available to subscribers. The article will be in German, but thanks very much, Switzerland.

I’ve asked my agent to look into making deals for the book’s publication in German and Spanish. (It’s already coming out in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan in the spring.) If any readers of this site would like to see it come out in a particular language, please send me an email — my agent can use it to show publishers that interested readers are out there.

It’s a funny and delicious feeling to know that people are reading my words all over the world. Right now, at this very moment, somebody must be reading the newspaper over dinner in Switzerland and saying to herself, in German, “Oh, this is interesting.” And dozens of people are flipping through an excerpt of Rebuilt in Delta’s inflight magazine right now while en route to Atlanta or Minneapolis or New York. And what am I doing at this moment? I’m cooking blintzes and tofu sausages for breakfast while my cats get underfoot in the kitchen. It’s like having created miniature windup versions of my consciousness that are running around on their own, beyond my control, cheerfully screwing with people’s minds.

December 3: Here come the eszközökkels!
An article on cyborgs has appeared in a Hungarian paper called, I think, Tudomany. According to the article, “A negyvenéves, születésétől fogva súlyosan halláskárosult (részben siket), korábban technológiai szakíró Michael Chorost rövid ideje rendelkezik fülébe ültetett gépi eszközökkel.” Uh, yeah. I understand exactly two words of that. Büt thánk yőü véry müch, Hungary. And I kind of like the words “megfeledkezünk” and “köszönhetően”. Say what you will about Hungarians, but they can sling around umlauts and accent marks like nobody’s business.

December 1: Of cyborgs and paying the rent.
There’s a new interview with me in Science and Theology News titled A cyborg explores what it means to be human. One line from it is, “He assures readers that no matter how advanced they are, cyborgs will still worry about paying the rent and taking care of the kids just like everybody else.” I find the word “advanced” a little peculiar — cyborg body parts are inferior to the organic parts they replace — but the bit about paying the rent and watching the kids is certainly true. I don’t have kids, but you get the idea.

November 30: Hi there, Cochlear Corporation.
Hi there, Cochlear Corporation people. I’ve been noticing a lot of hits on my site from Cochlear and I thought I’d invite you to say hello — why the sudden interest? (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the manufacturers, Cochlear makes the Nucleus Freedom and Nucleus 24 implants.)

I visited Cochlear’s site today and was pleased to see
significant new resources on learning to hear with a cochlear implant. None of these existed when I was activated in 2001. I would’ve been thrilled to have them back then. Their existence now is a big step forward in supporting new users in those difficult weeks after activation.

November 29: For me, the year is over.
I’m looking forward to a relaxed December where I’m not packing my suitcase and charging out the door nearly every week. In November I spent a week in Atlanta collecting data for a study of computer-based learning in schools, and spent a wonderful day at USC and the John Tracy Clinic in L.A. The John Tracy Clinic is a school for young children with hearing loss, and also runs a correspondence course helping parents around the world enrich their child’s language development. I’m a graduate of that course, which I discuss in my book on pages 29 and 30.

At USC, Dr. Gerald Loeb, a pioneer in developing the Clarion CII cochlear implant that I use, gave me a tour of the lab where his latest project, the Bion, is being developed. The Bion’s a general-purpose, radio-controlled neurostimulator which can be implanted in many parts of the body to treat a wide array of conditions, from incontinence to migraines to muscle loss from paralysis. It’s a tiny little cylinder containing an electrode, and it can be implanted with an injector rather than by surgery. There’s story about it on the Web here.

My Wired story’s gotten an excellent reception. I’ve gotten almost 70 emails on it so far, some of which will be printed in the January issue. I’ve tried to respond to as many of them as I can.

October 30: When does the new 121-channel software come out?
I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking when the new software that upgrades the Clarion CII and Hi-Res 90K to having 121 channels will be available. Advanced Bionics’ best guess is mid-2006.

September 29: Talks and blogs.
I gave a talk at the Institute for the Future on August 31, and Alex Pang wrote a nice summary of it here.

In his blog Cochbla, Josh Swiller has written a beautiful description of what it’s like to listen to sound with a cochlear implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the other:

“Almost as strong is the experience of sound when both my coch and my hearing aids are on. Through the right ear, the hearing aid brings warmth, weight, organic produce, tomatoes, barley grass and peat moss. A full, lush, three-dimensional oil-painting kind of sound. Through the left ear, the coch provides steel and structure. It’s airy and cool, a skeletal metal sculpture, solid and sharp.”

Josh’s blog is exceptionally well-written and I highly recommend it.

One of my students at the University of San Francisco mentioned in class today that she hears tinnitus (ringing in the ears) too, which reminds me that my implant center, the California Ear Institute, is runnning an investigational study on the effectiveness of Botox in controlling tinnitus. And you thought it was only good for facelifts.

Oh yes, one other piece of news (I can’t keep track of my own life anymore): REBUILT will be coming out in Japan sometime in 2006. What are the words for “cochlear implant” and “cyborg” in Japanese?

September 9: My nonstop life.
I’ve been neglecting this blog because life has been just crazy. Here’s a quick overview: I’m in the final stages of editing my Wired article on the new cochlear implant software that gives me 121 channels; my agent’s just sold my book for release in the UK and Commonwealth countries; Houghton Mifflin and I are working on the paperback version of the book (to come out in the spring); I started teaching academic writing at the University of San Francisco and have about 18 students; I’ve got half a dozen speaking gigs in October and more are being arranged; I’m continuing to consult to SRI International, my former employer; and I’m trying to put together a proposal for my second book. I’m well behind on my email, so if you’ve written me lately and haven’t heard back, my apologies. I’m catching up bit by bit.

I’ve signed a contract with a speaking bureau, American Program Bureau, to represent me. You can look up my profile on their web site by pulling down the “Quick Search” drop-down box to find my name.

Life is completely great. Being a published author is turning out to be every bit as fun as I had hoped it would be.

August 14: My cat adventure, or, Why being able to hear is good.
So this morning I was sitting on my couch typing away, and I heard a cat meowing. I went to the screen door - which I usually leave open so my cats can go in and out - and looked around. No sign of Elvis.

“Elvis!” I called.

meow meow

I looked in the garden: no sign of a cat.

I got a can of cat food, held it theatrically up in the air, and clicked it open. The sound usually brings him running. It’s my emergency cat call.

No Elvis. Just: meow meow meow.

Now I was worried. I went to the fence overlooking the next yard and peered over. No cat.

I went to the railing overlooking the driveway and leaned over it, scanning the ground below. There’s no way he could be down there. No way. He’s not stupid enough to try jumping 25 feet onto a concrete driveway.

I saw a flash of white, and there he was, on the driveway, swiveling his head every which way, looking scared and indignant.

“Elvis!” I called.

He looked up at me.

“You stay right there,” I shouted down to him. “I’m coming down to get you.”

When I opened the garage door he paced back and forth hesitantly ten feet away, intimidated by the big heavy slam it had made. I knelt down. I couldn’t pick him up, because I needed a hand free to unlock doors on the way back. “C’mere, Elvis,” I said. “C’mon. C’mon.”

He paced some more, then came to my hand. I ruffled the fur on top of his head.

“Elvis,” I said tenderly. “You idiot.”

He dubiously followed me through the garage, and jumped and spat at the elevator doors. I nudged him into the hallway. He ran straight to our door and pressed his nose into the doorjamb, unwilling to wait even another second to be let in.

Now he’s sprawled out luxuriously on the coffee table, quite unhurt, and I’m back at the laptop. I had heard him meowing a hundred feet away, 25 feet below my terrace. I’m just glad that during one of the few times in his life he really needed to be heard, I was able to hear him.

August 5: Conference on cochlear implants.
I’ve just come back from the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses (CIAP), which is held every two years at Asilomar, a resort near Monterey, California. I heard about a lot of new ideas for cochlear implants. I spoke to a number of engineers, mostly in academia, who are running around designing the following:

• Electrode arrays with 72 or more electrodes created using the same thin-film deposition techniques used to make computer chips. Present arrays are made by hand and have between 16 and 24 electrodes. It’s controversial whether more electrodes would be better, but the recent development of software that simulates virtual electrodes has made a believer out of me (see my discussion of music in earlier entries.)
• Fully implantable devices of various kinds, including ones with microphones situated behind the eardrum that would use miniature tuning forks to analyze sound mechanically instead of computationally, and processors that would use analog rather than digital electronics. The advantage of analog electronics is that they could better mimic the way the ear works – the cochlea isn’t a digital computer – and reduce power consumption. A processor that uses analog circuitry could run for 30 years on one battery.
• Arrays that would stimulate the cochlea with light rather than electricity. Apparently there are particular frequencies and intensities of laser light that cause neurons to fire, raising the possibility of putting a fiber-optic array inside the cochlea. Electricity tends to spread in the body’s wet, salty environment, giving rise to a problem called “channel interaction.” Channel interaction is a huge headache for engineers, so solving it by replacing electricity with light would be a major advance.