Windows is the operating system of the PC, but Google is quickly becoming the operating system of the world. I’ve found that I can’t write anymore without Google. I probably do five or six searches each hour, looking up various facts.

So I spent a good deal of today sniffing ’round the place. I had lunch with Jenn Shreve, a wonderfully creative writer who’s now working at their Mountain View campus. Eating in Google’s cafeteria is like living in a Star Trek post-cash economy of abundance. You don’t buy anything. You just take whatever you want. After lunch Jenn showed me a stunning display of a rotating earth showing, graphically, how many searches were going on around the globe in real time. It gave the impression of a planet glowing with data — although large parts of Africa and Asia were almost entirely dark. There’s still a long way to go.

Then I went to an open house in their San Francisco office. I went mainly to see Vinton Cerf, who wrote the Internet’s fundamental protocol, TCP/IP. Cerf has a hearing loss, as does his wife, who is a cochlear implant user. He got quite excited when I gave him a copy of my book, because he’d read my Wired article on software for music — which made me turn pink with pleasure. It’s a lot of fun to be recognized.

Cerf gave a marvelous talk on the challenges that face the Internet now, such as the fact that it’s fast running out of IP addresses (its current capacity of 4.3 billion addresses seemed like plenty back in the 1970s, but, well, things have changed since then.) There’s big social challenges too, like ensuring both security and anonymity at the same time, and working through its impact in countries that don’t have the same rules as Americans do about things like freedom of speech. He’s a great speaker: funny, fast, smart, engaging.

Then I went to see a jazz concert at Yoshi’s with a friend, and that’s a whole nother blog entry. But to keep it brief, I made two interesting discoveries. One is that jazz isn’t the right musical form for me right now; it’s so improvisational and sophisticated that for me it’s like a beginning English speaker going to a debate at Oxford. But there were particular passages that I enjoyed, where the instruments were harmonizing closely together in a way that sounded more symphonic than improvisational. And I got the sense - it’s just a sense - that my new right ear was getting the music better than the left. Not that it was hearing more, but that it was enjoying it more. A hemispheric lateralization thing, perhaps.

Well, it’s late; it’s been a long day; tomorrow I give a talk at the Institute for the Future, so I’m going to bed.

Yesterday was an amazing day because I inked deals for three speaking engagements: one at my alma mater Brown, one at a government policy conference near Yellowstone Park in Montana, and one at the SV Life Sciences CEO Connections Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. Details on these can be found on the Events page.

Also yesterday, Amazon posted a book I’ve been co-editing, titled “Educating Learning Technology Designers: Guiding and Inspiring Creators of Innovative Educational Tools.” It’ll be published by Routledge this summer.

A few days ago I published Looking into the Brain with Light in Technology Review. This story’s about monitoring oxygen levels in the brain using light. To me this technology seemed almost like magic — a bright laser light illuminates brain tissue through the skull, and ultrasonic waves “tag” a particular location so that its color can be measured by a light detector.

I was told today that in the next few weeks, NPR’s Radiolab show will be airing a show on musical hallucinations in which Oliver Sacks and I are guests. (Back in 2001 I experienced incredibly loud, vivid musical hallucinations during the three months I was totally deaf - the auditory equivalent of phantom limb. They stopped completely when my first implant was activated.)

I was also interviewed by The Economist a few days ago.

My buddy Josh Swiller, author of the remarkable memoir The Unheard: A Story of Deafness and Africa, is giving a talk in the Bay Area next month, March 22nd, at the California A.G. Bell meeting in Milpitas, near San Jose. For details, go to the “Annual Conference” page on their website.

My new right ear’s getting better at understanding speech. I find that when listening to Winnie-the-Pooh tapes I get whole sentences about 30% of the time. Names and numbers are easy; they jump out at me. I’m still not able to get the gist of the story, but the ear is clearly making progress. (My much more experienced left ear understands it easily, of course. It still seems strange — it’s as if half of me knows French fluently while the other half is fumbling around trying to learn it.) I’ll be going to a mapping session on Friday and maybe there I’ll be able to buy some more vowels. (I talked about vowels in my entry Shopping around for vowels.)

So, lots of good news.

I plan to start formally training the ear soon - more on that coming up…

My Two-Eared Party was this Saturday, and about 25 people came despite it being a cold, rainy night.

My friends held forth on acts of subversion, the thrills & tribulations of L.A. journalism, the mysteries of Nepal, sleeping on the floors of bus stations while traveling through 48 states to document people in the act of reading, the challenges of living with another person, the secrets of localizing sounds from above and below, the secrets of managing faculty careers, gallery openings by gay deaf artists, unexpected bus-stop encounters decades ago, various novels, and five-month-old babies.

It wasn’t particularly ritualistic. (I wrote about the need for ritual in my blog entry, Rituals of Getting a New Body Part.) I realized, as I put another bag of popcorn in the microwave, that it’s hard to create a sense of sacred time & space when you have to watch the wine bottles and make sure the chips haven’t run out. I think it’s going to take a few more centuries to work out how to do such things.

But it was a great party. And boy, having the second ear helped. It’s a great feeling to sit between two people and hear both of them.

I was walking up one of San Francisco’s many hills when I heard the shouting and laughing of children behind me.

Behind me? How did I know that?

Oh, right: I have two ears now.

I stopped and looked around. They sounded loud, and close. But I couldn’t see them.

Where were they?

I slowly pivoted in a circle to see what I heard in every direction. I had done this before with one ear, without success. Months ago, walking down Elizabeth Street , I had heard music on the air – perhaps a band practicing in a garage or backyard. It had sounded live, somehow. I’d stopped and looked around, trying to find it. But I couldn’t. The music was everywhere and nowhere at once. Placeless, undefined, omnipresent.

But now, today, the laughter and shouts sounded different at every point of the compass. I could feel it increasing in one ear at the same time that it diminished in the other ear. And there came a point, in one particular direction, that both ears came into synchrony. My body said: There. It’s there.

There are two different ways the brain uses to locate a sound. One is loudness difference, since one ear is further from the source than the other and “shadowed” by the head. The other is timing difference, since the sound arrives at the ears at different times. Was I hearing loudness difference, timing difference, or both?

An academic question, at the moment. I walked on, and five steps later, as I reached a crest, I saw them. Down the hill, two blocks away, the local schoolyard was full of children.

I was right.

Well, almost right: I’d been about ten degrees off.

I’m still working on balancing my ears. At the same spot on the volume wheel, they hear different loudnesses. So I was probably thrown off by that.

But just a bit. They were there, and I knew it.

(N.B. Check out this just-published study showing that people with one CI do much worse at localization than people with two CIs. Thanks to Ulf Nagel’s blog for pointing me to it.)

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.