My latest article, Living in Stereo, has just been published by The Journal of Life Sciences. This story is about my getting a second cochlear implant, or “going bilateral,” as we say. Careful readers of this blog will notice I’ve used (and heavily revised) some material from postings I wrote back back in January and February — but there’s plenty of new material, too. This piece basically sums up my experiences getting the implant and hearing with it during the first few weeks after activation.

This is my sixth publication in 2008. I really am cranking them out, aren’t I? It’s going to be a while before my next article, though, because in the next few weeks I’ll be traveling to MIT, Gallaudet, Key Biscayne (near Miami), and Northwestern (near Chicago). I’ve spent the last few months pounding away at the keyboard, so it’ll be good to get out and stretch my legs.

Confessions of a Bionic Man is the title of a Washington Post opinion piece I’ve just published in the Sunday edition of April 13th.

It starts this way: “If I were catapulted back in time to 1978, in many ways I’d find it easy to adjust. Cars would still be cars. Books would still be books. Stores would still be stores. But I’d look at people on the street and wonder, ‘How can they stand to be so disconnected? How do they make it through the day?’” Read the rest…

I enjoyed writing the story. The first draft said much more about fMRI technologies of brain-scanning, but the editor asked me to make it less science-y and more personal. So I’m saving up the fMRI material for another piece.

From today’s New York Times: “New Therapies Fight Phantom Noises of Tinnitus.” I’d no idea that so much progress had been made. It also talks about fMRI imaging, a technology I’ve been reading about a lot lately.