Articles by me

Living in Stereo, The Journal of Life Sciences, April 2008. This story is about getting a second cochlear implant, or “going bilateral,” as they say.

Confessions of a Bionic Man, Washington Post, Sunday, April 13th, 2008. This story uses my experience with cochlear implants to muse on how neurotechnology may change the way nondisabled people communicate.

The Networked Pill, Technology Review, March 20, 2008. This story is about a company named Proteus Biomedical that’s developing a pill that tells sensors mounted on the body that it’s been swallowed. The sensors record the time and monitor the body’s responses to the medication, such as heartrate and respiration. The idea is to let physicians directly measure a medicine’s effect on the body so they can tweak the dose. Amazing stuff.

Helping the Deaf Hear Music, Technology Review, February 26, 2008. This piece is about a new test, the Clinical Assessment of Music Perception (CAMP), that measures how well cochlear implant users hear the basic components of music: pitch, timbre, and melody. As it happens, I was one of the subjects in early trials of CAMP, and I talk about my experiences in the piece. If you’d rather read it in Dutch, click here.

Looking into the Brain with Light, Technology Review, January 29, 2008. 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.

The Naked Ear, Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2008 print edition. This is an expanded version of my story on Otologics’ fully implantable hearing aid for the print version of the magazine. The web version contains the full text, and also has a video of me explaining how it works.

An Algorithm That Makes Voices Clearer, Technology Review, November 28, 2007. This is about a set of headphones that makes voices clearer by adding high-frequency harmonics to them.

The First Body Computing Conference, Technology Review blog entry, November 7, 2007. I covered the first conference on body computing at USC.

The Invisible Hearing Aid, Technology Review, August 28, 2007. This story’s about a fully implanted hearing aid being developed by Otologics, a startup company in Boulder. There’s a lot of really interesting data in this article.

Making Deaf Ears Hear with Light, Technology Review, August 10, 2007. This story’s about using infrared laser light instead of electricity to stimulate neural cells in the cochlea. If it works, it could lead to much better cochlear implants in the future.

“The Mind-Programmable Era”, The Futurist, May-June 2006. Alas, the article’s not available online.

Risky enough business?, on a conference covered 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, met venture capitalists, and found out about plans for returning to the moon. February 8, 2006.

My Bionic Quest for Boléro, Wired, November 2005.

Television and radio interviews

Here’s a video I did explaining how fully implantable hearing aids work to accompany a story I wrote for Technology Review; this is one of the ones I most enjoyed making. This came out in the winter of 2007.

On October 12th, 2006, I was a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. They did a two-hour special on the controversies at Gallaudet, the future of deaf culture, and cochlear implants.

In June 2006 the podcast show AfterTV released an audio interview with me, conducted by Andrew Keen. Listen here.

Guest on various United Kingdom media, including BBC Breakfast TV, Radio 3, Radio Leiceister, Radio Merseyside, Radio Jersey, Radio Birmingham, Radio Kent, Radio Essex, Radio Southern Counties, Saga Radio Nottingham, Saga Radio Glasgow, and Radio 5 Live: Up at Night. April 2006.

Jocelyn Gonzales interviews me on Studio 360 (MP3), March 2, 2006.

Weekend America (RealAudio), February 4, 2006.

R.U. Sirius and Sherry Miller on MondoGlobo (MP3), February 6, 2006.

CBS Marketwatch, July 21, 2005.   (Registration may be required - it’s free.)

WNYC: June 20, 2005.
The Leonard Lopate Show
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/06202005

KQED: June 23, 2005.
Michael Krasny’s "Forum" on KQED.  1-hour live call-in show.
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R506231000

National Public Radio: July 10, 2005.
Weekend Edition.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4737586

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: January 10, 2006.
Freestyle. http://www.cbc.ca/freestyle

Articles about me

“Sounds like a good idea” is a story in the March 2008 issue of The Economist on the prospects of upgrading cochlear implants. I’m quoted several times. My favorite part is where I’m quoted as saying that my rule of thumb for upgrading my computer, do it when memory and speed quadruple, also applies to my cochlear implant.

A story about my visit to Gallaudet, published Nov. 13, 2007.

Healthy Hearing, October 30, 2007. “Modern Bionics: When Is a Human Not a Human?”

“Imagine this. You’re at a busy airport waiting for your rental car when the sound goes off. Not the sound of your MP3 player or the sounds of speakers announcing arrivals and departures. The sound of the world goes off. The sound of the shuttle buses is muffled. Cars sound like they’re a hundred yards away. Instantly, the multi-sensory world is missing the sense of hearing for Michael Chorost”…Read more.

New Jersey Jewish News, March 2, 2006, page 7. “Hearing Loss Gives NJ Native His Voice.” By Nancy Sokoler Steiner.

“That journey — from a severely hearing impaired toddler in suburban New Jersey to the successful author holding his file in Los Angeles — transcends mere time or geography. For Chorost, it has been a journey from alienation to acceptance, from bystander to participant, and from deafness to hearing”….Read more.

Brown Alumni Monthly, Jan/Feb 2006. “The Cyborg: If a computer filters everything you hear, are you still human?” By Norman Boucher.

A mini-review by my alma mater’s magazine. “Along the way, Chorost fills out his memoir with explorations of the deaf community’s ambivalence about cochlear implants, as well as the issues raised by an increasing reliance on bioengineering. In the end, he concludes, it’s not the gadgets that make you better, it’s what you make of them”….Read more.

SKY (Delta’s inflight magazine), December 2005, “The Human Cyborg.”

The article consists of an excerpt from the book and a mini-review. They say, “It is the book Chorost (pronounced “KOR-ist”) was clearly born to write. He blends his science-writing expertise—which enables him to explain his deafness, his surgery and the details of his programming lucidly and exactly—with a fine literary style.” The editor tells me that SKY reaches over 3 million readers each month….Read more.

Science and Theology News, November 23, 2005, “A cyborg explores what it means to be human.” By Seth Glick.

“With a cochlear implant, the biology of your ear is not running the show anymore — the software controlling the electrodes is,” said Chorost, who was partially deaf since birth. “You become a creature of software, and I found that a strange and creepy thought at first.” Read more.

Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, October 28, 2005. “New cyborg in Noe Valley.” By Jennifer Liss.

Excerpt: Meet Noe Valley’s newest Jewish cyborg. Michael Chorost was impatiently standing in line for a rental car when suddenly, his hearing began to fade. Having been hearing-impaired for most of his life, 36-year-old Chorost assumed the batteries in his hearing aids had run down. But the batteries were fine. On July 7, 2001, Chorost completely lost his hearing…Read more.

U.S. News & World Report, July 13, 2005. “Learning to love being part computer.” By Cory Hatch.

Excerpt: On July 7, 2001, Michael Chorost’s world went silent. The hearing aids he’d worn since becoming partially deaf since birth as a result of rubella no longer helped. Several months later, Chorost opted for an operation to implant a tiny computer-about the size of three stacked quarters and called a cochlear implant-in his skull behind his ear…Read more.

Noe Valley Voice, July-August 2005, “Michael Chorost Tells Us What Bionic Hearing Feels Like”, by Laura McHale Holland.

Excerpt: I think that science fiction expresses a deeply held fear that many people have that technology will dehumanize us. That’s why it portrays cyborgs as emotionless robots or monsters…Read more.

East Bay Express, June 29, 2005. “Hi, I’m Bionic.” By Chris Ulbrich.

Excerpt: Dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, Chorost looks considerably less like a Star Trek Borg than the thoughtful sci-fi aficionado and holder of a Ph.D in English that he is. Yet this is indeed the author of the remarkable and warmly funny memoir Rebuilt…Read more.

New York Times, June 20, 2005. “Robo-Legs.” By Michel Marriott.

Excerpt coming…more (registration required).

South by Southwest interviewed me on June 2005. Here’s the interview on SXSW’s web site.