When I woke up on Monday my left ear – the one implanted since 2001 – sounded different. Gritty, hollow. My voice sounded remote and thin. When I moved a soda can on my coffee table, it made a tinny sound.

I pondered that as I brushed my teeth. Sometimes the ear abruptly sounds different, and it either slowly returns to “normal” or I adjust to it. I’ve never figured out why. I’ve learned not to worry about it.

But the timing was odd. I’d heard stories – just rumors, really – that when a person goes bilateral, the original ear gets worse for a while. Why, no one seems to know.

And here I was, four days post, with a left ear that suddenly sounded gritty and hollow.

The ear had taken a beating in the past four days. Every keystroke and every phoneme going into the new right ear had made the left one ring for several seconds afterward. Typing my name, M-I-K-E, sounded like this:

tap-bing tap-bing tap-bing tap-bingggggggg

And the right ear, the new one, was massively overstimulated. Every night when I took off the processors both ears were howling. Roaring sounds, rushing sounds, bits and scraps of music.

Could it be, I wondered, that the left ear was simply tired?

I shouldered my backpack and walked down to my office. Not knowing what my nervous system was up to. My body was changing on me, in obscure ways. My footsteps sounded heavy and dull in the rain.

I work in a converted Victorian flat turned into a minature warren of writers’ offices. It’s always been a hard environment for listening, with high ceilings, narrow hallways, and wooden floors. How would I do today?

Badly, it turned out. I visited Scott James in his office and missed two words in the very first sentence he said to me. Diane Weipert came by and I found myself skidding against her words, unable to find footing in them. When people were hanging out in the kitchen I stayed in my office, bewildered and confused. How could this be happening after my spectacular successes in cafes on Thursday and Saturday?

At the end of the day I stopped by Diane’s office. “Those headphones I loaned you,” I said. “Can I have them back?” They were high-quality headphones I’d gotten some time ago, but they hadn’t done much for me.

At home I looked at my CD player and thought, I might as well plug them in and see what happens.

I put my left processor on Fidelity 120 and turned the right one way up. Gingerly, I put the headphones on. They fit snugly over both processors. The headpieces stuck out: from the back, it probably looked like they were trying to escape.

I got into bed. Elvis hopped up and settled down with his front paws on my left ankle.

I chose a classical CD with Debussy’s Clair de lune – two instruments only, oboe and harp. It was a slow, meandering piece, tones and glissades. I could feel the right ear feeding me the soundstream. I took off the left headpiece to isolate the right: yes, it was working. It didn’t sound as limpid and clear as the left, but it was giving me music, mirroring the left.

Mirroring? Actually, no, I realized. The headphones were shifting the sound intensities back and forth between them, playing off of each other.

Stereo.

And I was caught up in it: following the contours of the piece, its wholeness, its probing of the emotional resonances of sound; a moonlit glade with the stars wheeling overhead.

“It sounds lovely,” I breathed.

Wow.

It held my attention the way a good story does. I listened to it three more times, once with only the right, once only with the left, then once with both again. Disassembling and reassembling the piece.

If it sounded this good to me, what must it sound like to a person with normal ears?

The next piece was Sibelius’s Valse triste, and I heard its ominous undercurrent – the shifty rhythm beating underneath the strings.

I moved on to Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, which I’d heard many times before. Now, though, I realized that listening to it with one ear had been as pointless as walking down the aisle alone.

That’s because music reaches into you and works on your brain. And to do it, it needs to work with all of the brain. Hearing music with only one ear engages only half of the brain. And half is not enough. It just isn’t.

The March is about twos and joys, climaxes and beginnings. I thought of my friend Joe’s wedding to his wife Heather, and of how her beige gown swirled as she danced on the floor, and of the joy they and I felt that day. I welled up a bit, to my surprise. But that’s what music is supposed to do. Hearing it in both ears was like the difference between a live and a dead body: the form was the same, but the experience was oh so different.

And then I ate the rest of the CD. I listened to all of it: Brahms, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky. Well, actually, I left the 1812 Overture for another day because it was three o’clock in the morning. I took my processors off, stuck the batteries in the charger, and went to sleep.

I learned more about music in one day than I had in the past thirty years.

The next day, I did a lot better in the office. I think it was the echoes that had confused me: I hadn’t heard reverb in both ears in decades.

And I discovered that I was hearing much less of the bing in my left ear. But that’s another story.

This is going to be a quick entry, since I’m on deadline today. Notes from yesterday:

1. Out of sheer curiosity, I plugged my right hearing aid into my ear and found that it was working as well as it had before the surgery. It hadn’t been much of an ear, of course; all it could hear was footsteps, thumps on a table, and the remote, ghostlike echo of my own voice. But it could still hear those things now. The surgery does not seem to have damaged its few remaining hair cells.

2. I went to a movie, The Golden Compass, and had a great time hearing it in both ears. I understood most of the dialogue, and was caught up, in a way I haven’t been before, in the wholeness of the sound.

3. I had a lot of fun playing with the balance control of my car’s radio. I found that I could tell the difference between one speaker and the other. I’ll have to get a friend to do it for me and see if I can differentiate between the left and right speakers “blind”.

4. I have, alas, misplaced the brown headpiece cover on my new processor. I know lots of Auria/Harmony users read this blog; would anyone be willing to trade one of their brown covers for one of my black or silver ones?

This coming week will have lots of lunches and meetings in cafes: an enjoyable minefield of auditory challenges. I can’t wait.

So, on Day 3 after activating my other ear, here’s what I know so far:

1. The implant works. Good strong neural response to all electrodes.

2. It can understand speech when aided by reading cues, and it gets bits and pieces of uncued speech.

3. It helps a lot in noise.

So today I’ve been wondering why speech sounds so eerily real but not yet understandable, for the most part. I’m not impatient; it took weeks for me to get to this point with the other ear, back in 2001. Progress has been terrific. But it’s a neurological mystery. Today I’ve done some detective work.

To start with, I decided to listen to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees to figure out what, exactly, my right ear is hearing.

My overriding impression is that speech sounds abrupt and shortened – as if words that actually take 100 milliseconds to say had been shoehorned into 70 milliseconds. Another way to put it is that it feels like pieces of the words are missing.

It’s like watching a squirrel. Instead of smooth glidings from one position to the next there’s discontinuous jumps, as if random frames had been edited out of reality.

But the “editing” isn’t so random. I listened closely to one passage and wrote down what it sounded like to me. Here’s the original:

It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.

And here’s what I hear with my right ear:

It is, as fur as he knuzz, th’ only wy of coming downstrrrs, but sumtimes he fils that there rilly is another wy, if only hih could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he fls that purhaps there iznt. Unyhw, here hih is at the bottom, and ready to be intriduced to yu. Winnie-the-Pooh.

Instead of hearing that long orotound o – as in knooows – I hear an abrupt foreshortened version of it: knuzz. It’s not that the word is actually shorter, although it sounds that way. It’s that the percept of the o is missing or incomplete. The speech sounds brittle and chopped up.

It throws me off enough that I can’t follow the sense of the soundstream. But, as you can see, there is plenty remaining, which makes it very easy to follow if I’m reading along with the text. And peculiarly, there are isolated instants of lucidity: the long o in Pooh comes through loud and clear.

Now, here’s the crux of it. I listened to the same passage just now with my left ear, which has been online and working since 2001. All the vowels were in their proper places sounding like their normal selves. Nice long o’s, good proper even a’s. I can understand the tape perfectly well. So the vowel-decoding software is functioning just fine in my brain.

What’s going on? Let’s consider the possibilities.

Possibility 1: The right ear’s software is not giving me vowel information. I doubt this. It’s the same ‘ware as is running in my left ear – 16-channel Hi-Res P – and the map is approximately the same. If I could put my right processor on my left ear (which I can’t, as each processor is keyed to one specific implant), my left ear would hear pretty much the same as it’s hearing now. No, the information has to be there. Which brings us to –

Possibility 2: My auditory nerves aren’t picking up certain kinds of information. They’ve been unused for many years. But neural atrophy seems to be only a partial explanation at best, because I’m hearing consonants and environmental sounds. Not only that, neural response telemetry showed that the nerves are responding strongly across the board.

Possibility 3: My brain is getting the information but doesn’t know how to use it. It seems to me that this has to be the case. But why, if my brain already knows how to interpret neural input coming from 16 electrodes refreshing themselves 5,156 times per second?

It’s well-known that the right ear sends most of its signal to the left hemisphere for high-level processing, and that the hemispheres have only partial access to what each other knows. But there is significant crossover as the signal ascends neural pathways to the auditory cortex. A quick glance at a diagram from Yost’s Fundamentals of Hearing makes that clear. (It’s the 4th edition, 2000, p. 228.)

The cochlear nucleus – the auditory’s nerve’s terminus in the brain – sends signals to the right superior olivary complex as well as the left one. The inferior colliculus on both sides are connected to each other, too. Basically, the right ear’s input makes its way to the auditory cortex on both sides, although the path on the right side is more convoluted.

I’m guessing that the echo I’ve been hearing comes from crosstalk between the right and left halves of my auditory system. As I noted in an earlier entry, my left ear rings whenever sound goes into the right ear. Right now, as I’m typing, each keystroke is followed by a bright ringing sound in the left ear that takes 3 to 5 seconds to fade.

This is a mystery for two reasons. First, why is it happening at all? And why do I hear the ringing in the other ear this time, whereas before, in 2001, I heard it in the implanted ear?

One wild idea I’m having is that some of the missing vowels are in that ring, somehow. (It’s reduced by about 50% when the left ear is active, by the way. Then it sounds like a brief bright chime.) The ringing did go away last time – so I’m paying careful attention this time to see if it happens again, and when.

To answer Jeff’s question in my last post, pitches do sound different in both ears. Music sounds different, in that certain pitches I hear with my left ear are less “pure” in my right ear. I’m not sure which pitches are different, because I tend to be poor at identifying pitch, especially on Hi-Res 16. (I’ll explain in a later post why I’m using Hi-Res 16 in both ears at the moment instead of Fidelity 120; it’s a strategic decision to scale down the complexity of mapping two ears.)

I spent about an hour studying Fundamentals of Hearing this afternoon. Now I’m going to try a different tack: I’m going to walk about town and hang out at Dubliner’s on 24th Street for a while, and see what happens. Perhaps a pint of Fat Tire will bring illumination.

In my second mapping session today we adjusted the right ear to give more current in the high-frequency electrodes. That makes speech crisper, and I can get occasional words here and there when listening to books on tape. It sounds tantalizingly like real language, but I haven’t broken through yet.

– Yet? That’s like getting a bionic arm on Thursday and expecting to be able to play catch with it on Friday.

Still, it sounds so much like language that I’m wondering why my brain isn’t able to decode it. In a comment on “The World Whole and Full” Steve wrote, “Perhaps…something clicks in the brain that says ‘oh hey, I know what this is, communication — it’s time to access the speech comprehension database that the other ear uses all the time.’”

But I can’t say I’m having that experience. I’m not tapping into the database yet.

Perhaps the missing link is that I haven’t listened to books-on-tape while following along with the text yet. Maybe for a new ear, a new one-to-one mapping between percept and meaning needs to be established before comprehension can happen.

After the mapping I went to meet with two friends in a cafe in Palo Alto. This was my first social encounter since activation, and the setting was a doozy: dozens of people yammering away, cappucino machines howling, baskets of rattling forks, and rain pattering outside, lots of it.

Man, did it help to have a second ear. It helped considerably more than I expected it to. Even though the ear can’t deliver meaningful language yet, it delivers phonemes, lots of them, good solid ones. Here’s an analogy to describe what it felt like. Say that hearing’s like walking a tightrope across a river. It helps a lot to have one rope to hold onto — that’s like having one ear. Having two ropes, one on each side, makes things that much firmer and more solid; a sway in one direction can then be corrected by having the other side to push against.

That’s what having two ears is like.

So even though the right ear can’t understand much of anything on its own yet, the fact that it’s delivering phonemes in synchrony with the left gives me backup. If an “s” sound on the left is backed up with a simultaneous percept of crispness on the right, that makes the “s” that much more definitively an “s”.

Another side to lean on. I tried pulling off the right headpiece to see what things were like without it, and that side I was leaning on just dropped away. I lasted all of ten seconds before sticking it back on. “Wow, that helps,” I said. “Wow.”

I understood both of my friends without having to work very much to do it; it was easy. Amid the yowling of the cafe we had a perfectly civilized conversation.

Now I’ve just spent half an hour watching Seinfeld, right ear only, with Elvis snoozing on my chest. The extra amperage in the high frequencies makes all the characters sound over-the-top Noo Yawk nasal. Even Elaine, shiksa quintessential, sounds Jewish now.

I needed the captions to follow it. But there was an uncaptioned ad, a political spot for casino gaming laws, that I understood entirely. That really surprised me, since I didn’t get any of the ones before or after. Something about that particular voice came through as English.

So there was my breakthrough moment. The first thing my dead right ear understands on its own after thirty years of silence? An ad for casino gaming laws.

I’ll take it.

I discovered the volume wheel last night. With cochlear implants, a quantitative change creates a qualitative change. In other words, when I turn the volume up, it doesn’t just sound louder; it sounds different. Frequencies that I couldn’t hear at all at a low volume jump out at a higher one.

So while listening to Gloria Estefan’s Live for Loving You, an auditory touchstone of mine, I found that when I turned up the volume to maximum — yes, the very top of the dial — it began to sound like music again. The lows and highs of her voice filled in. It’s nowhere near as good as the left ear, but it brought the right ear closer to being a partner of the left.

It occurred to me that playing my CD at top volume might be distorting the sound, so I tried lowering it; I’m not sure what that did yet.

While sitting in my chair I kept subtracting one ear after the other to figure out what each was contributing to the soundstream. It’s hard for me to put that in words just yet. But the total of both ears is more than their simple sum.

I also discovered dimensionality. I found that if I stood in front of my computer and rotated 360 degrees while listening to NPR, it sounded different depending on my ears’ angle relative to the speakers. When my right ear was toward them I was getting a crisp sensation of speech that matched, but also differed from, my left ear. And different angles gave me different total perceptions.

Whether I’m hearing the difference because of simple loudness — one ear being closer than the other — or because my brain is recognizing the time difference between them, I don’t know yet.

The right ear is also picking up bits and scraps of speech on its own. Words like “Valentino” and “Barack Obama.” And damn, the soundstream sounds like language now. It sounds exactly like spoken language, with lots of firm and clear phonemes, but the ear can’t understand most of it yet.

Wearing the right ear at top volume is making it a somewhat closer match to the left ear. It shakes me up a bit to have so much coming in from the right side. I soft-footed it around my apartment for a while. It’s not uncomfortable, just startling. It’s like suddenly discovering a new room in a house that one’s lived in for decades. All that new space! What do to do with it?

I’m heading in for my second mapping session soon.

I’m listening to NPR with my right ear plugged into my computer. It’s the first day in 30 years that my right ear has heard anything other than vague risings and fallings like the sussuration of the sea. Now, there’s definition. Most of the Ling vowels, the ooo and ahh and ssss and shhh sounds that constitute speech, are suddenly there like rocks emerging abruptly out of fog.

Or, to use another metaphor, it’s like watching an endless string of Hebrew letters streaming by — זקמרכלמטעמלךטכצד — in a way that looks like intelligible language but isn’t yet. Not yet. It’s too early. I can tell there’s serifs and curls and eddies in the soundstream, but they rush by heedless.

But on this first day, the ear works. Neural response telemetry showed that the nerves are responding strongly to the electrical stimulation. Eppur si muove: it reports to me the important news of footsteps, doors shutting, Elvis meowing, rain raking the roof of Diane’s Mini Cooper as it brought us back north to San Francisco. It is contributing, audibly, to the soundstream. As I paid for the mapping session the secretary to my right was rustling papers, and the ear delivered neural input – several million bits’ worth – to the effect of, Concussive/abrupt/staccato events are happening. Over here. On this side. I don’t know if you’re interested, but here you go. An inexperienced but eager junior partner, first day on the job, doing its best.

A very inexperienced junior partner. It is behaving strangely. Paradoxically, even. I called my mom using the right ear, and it understood her! really! but then I took off the left processor, and intelligible speech degraded into prosody. Parody. Yet my left ear is not good enough to hear a phone on the other side of my head muffled by auricles. I could not possibly have heard enough with my left ear to follow her. I do not understand that. Summation?…One ear juicing up the other?…

I’ve been testing the ear. Taking it out for a spin, seeing what it can do. When I watch TV captioned with only the right ear it can follow the voice as long as my brain has been informed by the captions what is coming. I can match up the neural input to the semantic meaning. I watched Abbie Cranmer’s activation video, which is captioned (beautiful move, Abbie – how did you do it?), and the ear could follow her voice quite well.

More paradoxes: when I listen only with the right ear, speech sounds are trailed by breathy echoes, hissy doublings of final phonemes – but it sounds like the hiss is coming from my left ear. When I take the right processor off, the hiss in my left ear lasts about five more seconds before fading out. Sometimes it’s a bright ringing hum rather than a hiss. As if my right processor was pumping the left ear full of data, like a balloon, which takes about five seconds to deflate once the soundstream shuts off.

Crosstalk. It feels like neural crosstalk, the experienced right hemisphere intercepting data from the left and trying, in befuddlement, to claim it as its own.

I tried music in the right ear. The Blue Danube was a croaky, asthmatic version of what the left ear hears. Unrecognizable as music. A long way to go on that score. (For the moment, I’m running Hi-Res 16 in both ears.)

The ears are unbalanced, too. The world sounds very different to each of them. The right ear seems to pick up only immediate sounds: my own voice, my footsteps. Sounds further away don’t seem to enter into the picture. An important task of my next mapping session, which is tomorrow, will be beginning the long work of balancing them.

What about localization? I try playing with my keyboard:

aaaa;;;;;aaa;;;aaa;;;;;aaa;;;;;aaaaa;;;;;;;aaa

The a’s sound like they’re on my left, as they always have, but the ;’s sound like they’re on my right now, instead of just dimmer sounds on the left.

Am I really localizing? I could be fooling myself: what one perceives is strongly conditioned by expectations. The senses aren’t obedient dray animals that do as they’re told. They’re more like intelligent horses that, once you get on them, decide they have their own ideas about where you should go. My brand-new right ear is going to have a mind of its own even on its first day on the job.

It’s the beginning of a trajectory. Back in 2001, when my left ear was activated it couldn’t understand speech at all. Six months later I was using a cellphone. Now my right ear is on its way.

Having two ears feels both familiar and strange. My body is at once saying This is very strange and This feels strangely familiar. I was supposed to have two ears all along, and today, for the first time in thirty years, I do.

My Blackberry died quietly in the night on Tuesday. I’d put it on my night-table, as usual. When I woke the screen was blank except for the characters JVM 523 and a reset button – which didn’t work.

I took it to the Verizon store in the Mission district. Walking the six blocks from prim, yuppie Noe Valley to the Mission is like taking a wormhole that deposits you in Mexico. The store was sandwiched between a Payless shoe store on one side and A.J’s Meat Market on the other.

The clerk’s hair was slicked back and his tie said, “I’m under 20 and don’t know how to tie these things yet.” I handed my Blackberry over to him the way I would hand my cat Elvis to the vet.

“JVM 523,” I said mournfully.

The clerk got tech support on the line and conferred with them while I wandered around the store peering at new cellphones. He beckoned me over ten minutes later.

“It’s dead,” he said.

“You can’t just reload the operating system?”

“They say not.”

“How can software kill a Blackberry?” I said. “It’s just code.”

He shrugged. He hadn’t been hired to answer philosophical questions.

“There’s no way to get my phone numbers out of it?” I asked.

“They say not.”

But, he told me, for fifty bucks they could send me a new one overnight.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

I walked out of the store feeling naked. No connection to the Internet. Just me and my lone autonomous body.

The street was full of avocados and plantains, $15 knapsacks hanging from awnings, and rows of watches in grimy store windows. Crinkly-faced women pushed kids in strollers and grabbed their hands to keep them from pulling no-brand socks out of cardboard boxes.

In the U.S., stores have big things spaced far apart. In Mexico – aka the Mission – they have lots of little things stuffed close together. I roamed and browsed. The aisles in one store were so narrow I had to flatten myself against a wall of womens’ underwear to let two little kids go past. One of them was carrying a Transformers robot.

I was in the real world; the material world. No email. No way to call or be called. No google. Naked.

My Blackberry had changed my life. A few weeks before I had used it to look up the height of Twin Peaks while I was walking up them. Took thirty seconds; I pulled up google, typed “twin peaks san francisco”, and got the answer: 922 feet.

A factoid? Yes – but knowing it gave me an intuitive sense of what climbing nearly a thousand feet felt like. Heck, all I had to do was go up and down thirty times, and that’d be the equivalent of climbing Everest.

Well, maybe not.

But it had come in even handier when I visited a remedial math classroom at Gallaudet, the nation’s university for the deaf in Washington D.C. The professor spoke in English with an interpreter translating into ASL, but it was a polyglot situation because she signed occasionally as well. She was enchanting to watch; as she talked about functions and slopes, she gestured as if drawing them in midair.

The class handout gave me her name: Regina Nuzzo. I unholstered my Blackberry, held it under the desk at an angle, called up google, and stealthily typed her name into it. I scrolled down the results with the thumbwheel. In about two minutes I knew that she was thirty-five years old and had a progressive hearing loss. She had a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford and had done a postdoc at McGill.

And – oh, this was interesting – she was a science writer. She’d just done a story on hybrid cochlear implants. I read a few screenfuls of it.

“Who’s got the answer to question 4?” she was saying. “Anyone? Does anybody have it?” Behind her, the interpreter was signing rapidly. (I’d figured out how ASL does fractions.)

I looked at Regina thinking, Wow, another deaf science writer with a Ph.D.

The ability to consult the planet’s external memory while walking down the street, or sitting in a classroom, is more than a matter of convenience. It means having the planet’s knowledge at your command in daily life.

And having that knowledge gives one a richer relationship to the world. Now I knew Regina’s background, her history, her interests. It gave her depth, dimension, a local habitation and a name.

She swept one hand around the classroom, taking in all the students, tapping her thumb and index finger together. It was the DO-DO-DO sign, meaning, in this context, “What shall we do now? What’s next?”

I had used my Blackberry to access the Internet constantly. To find out: How high am I climbing? What do the critics say about this movie? Where can I find tent stakes near Market Street? How many people were at Burning Man? Where are Scientific American’s offices relative to here? When is the next bus coming?

And, most profoundly, Who is this person?

I’d had to be impolite, though. I’d been peering at my hands while she was talking. (Fortunately, I was sitting way off the side.) And it had been unwieldy. Take out socially ostentatious gadget, type, wait, scroll, read. My meat fingers; an awkward soapbar-sized gadget with a tiny screen and a slow wireless link.

Suppose it was possible to implant circuitry in the head that would enable people to simply think google searches and get the answers immediately?

That may sound completely and utterly barking mad. But I’m a guy who already has a computer inside his head feeding him data. Two, now, actually. Certain ideas come easier when one has 32 electrodes in one’s head.

How could it be done?

You would have to have some way of physically monitoring brain activity and triggering it. One possibility is to put thousands of nanometer-sized wires inside the brain’s capillaries to detect and influence neural activity on a large scale. Let’s assume that such a rig could be safely installed. A big if, but let’s assume for the sake of argument. (I co-wrote a PBS show, The 22nd Century, exploring the idea last year.)

Let’s also assume that it could be entirely installed within the head, and powered from within as well. These aren’t such big ifs anymore. It’s already possible to power implanted devices with lithium-ion batteries that are recharged inductively through the skin. (See my story “The Naked Ear” in the January 2008 issue of Technology Review.)

Then you would have to have software that could interpret the data. As it happens, I stayed in touch with Regina after the class, and soon afterward she wrote a story on brain-scanning. She reported that researchers could tell when people were seeing particular actors on a TV screen by watching their brain activity with an fMRI scanner. They’d recorded what happened when the subjects were known to be seeing those actors, and looked for the same activity again. It takes a lot of math and computing power to do it, but the principle is straightforward.

The neural activity corresponding to inner speech ought to be relatively easy to decode, since it’s such a stereotyped activity. That would make it possible to issue computer commands by “speaking” them to oneself.

Such things are being done now, on a simpler level. At Brown University, my alma mater, researchers are implanting arrays of 100 electrodes in the brains of totally paralyzed people that enable them to control mouse pointers by brain activity – that is, by thinking. At the University of Pittsburgh, monkeys with similar brain implants have learned to control robot arms to reach out and bring food to their mouths – again, by thinking.

Interpreting inner speech is going to be harder than that, but there shouldn’t be any reason in principle why it can’t be done. This month a new study came out in which researchers were able to identify which of ten pictures a subject was looking at. What was especially new about this study is that they were able to do it based on other subjects’ neural patterns – suggesting that in at least that respect, human brains are not all that different from each other.

And it should be possible to give the user neural stimulation that would be perceived as speech. It wouldn’t be that different from what auditory brainstem implants do now. An auditory brainstem implant directly stimulates the auditory cortex with implanted electrodes. (It’s different from a cochlear implant, which stimulates the inner ear.)

Visual input – that is, making the visual cortex believe it sees something like a computer screen — would be harder. The eye moves rapidly to focus on various areas of the screen, so vision is the outcome of retinal input and motor commands. It’s not a passive input process. But there is a great deal of research being done to create retinal implants – devices that restore vision to the blind – and it should carry over into what we’re considering here.

Now that’s a lot to go through to have a Blackberry inside the body.

But consider how profoundly it would change the user’s relationship to the world. The barrier between the body and the world of information, now mediated by clumsy fingers and strained eyes, would disappear. The global Internet would become one’s own long-term memory.

It’s quite a thought.

It would make us a different species.

My Blackberry’s given me an inkling of what it would be like to have that kind of mind. When it died, it was like losing part of my mind. JVM 523: instant technological Alzheimer’s.

All day my left hand kept futilely reaching toward where I wear it on my pants. But the replacement arrived by fedex the next day, as promised. I lost none of my email, because it was all stored on a server. I lost a few memos and a bunch of phone numbers, but those can be stored on a server too. Now I could throw my Blackberry into the bay and have everything back within 24 hours.

Much later, when I told Regina what I’d been doing in her class, she’d been amused. “Cyberspying,” she’d said. “No, I wasn’t,” I protested. “It’s not spying since it’s all public information.”

Although I did have to go out of my way to get it. But such information is getting to be as visible as one’s clothes.

Indeed, the very idea of privacy is eroding. Television shows exhibit personal dramas to the world. MySpace pages confess all. Cellphones have erased the distinction between work time and personal time. As New York Magazine put it, “More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would…every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure.”

I think the time is coming when it’ll be considered rude not to google someone. How gauche, to have to ask someone where they went to school.

Gallaudet felt like a trial run for that kind of future. Everywhere I went I saw hands flickering like leaves, livid with meaning. A signer could get a synoptic overview of the campus’s social life just by glancing around the cafeteria. Every conversation at every table could be read off as comprehensively as a pilot glancing across a bank of instruments. “It’s like living in the proverbial fishbowl – there’s no secrets,” another professor told me, rolling her eyes. It felt like a glimpse into an intimately wired future. To have that kind of awareness; to be so knowing, and so known.

If you’re deaf, such a scenario is extraordinarily attractive. Above all else, deafness strikes at community. At communitas: camaraderie, fellowship, solace. My Blackberry links me to a larger world in ways my ears don’t. Having one electronic ear is far better than having none, but it still gives me only a monochromatic trickle of information. It will be interesting to see if activating the other one – four days from now – reduces my attachment to the electronic world.

Regina and I confer a lot these days. She doesn’t have a Blackberry, though.

She’s got a SideKick.