Dennis Hollingsworth

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The President's Analyst: The Cerebrum Communicator

I like to leaven my appreciation for techno-dystopianism with a good dose of techno-optimism:

My life has changed even more than most: I have information technology inside my body. I'm deaf, having had rubella (German measles) before I was born. Fortunately, the damage wasn't complete, so I was able to get by with hearing aids until 2001. Then my "good" ear abruptly quit working, for reasons that are still unknown. My hearing aids couldn't help me anymore, just as glasses can't help a blind person.

Now I have a cochlear implant in each ear. At first glance, they look like behind-the-ear hearing aids -- but the technology is totally different. They digitize sound and broadcast the data through quarter-size radio transmitters. The transmitters are stuck to my head, behind my ears, using magnets.

The data are picked up by implants countersunk into my skull, which send the information to 16 electrodes in my inner ears. The electrodes trigger my auditory nerves with tiny, precisely targeted shocks, making them send sound information to my brain.

My implants don't aid my hearing. They create my hearing.

What I hear is, quite literally, a computer simulation of real sound. The day my first implant was activated in 2001, voices sounded bizarre; the radio might as well have been in Esperanto. That was because the software couldn't reproduce all the aspects of a normal auditory system. Still, I learned how to recognize consonants and vowels again by listening to books on tape. Now I can turn on the radio and hear it all but effortlessly.

In 2005, I got new software that made music sound brighter and clearer.

But there are other, much more intriguing possibilities. The human body hasn't changed in millions of years -- and that's a problem. Our bodies don't do very well with information technology. Screens are tiny and eye-straining, and keyboards injure fingers and wrists. Even people with young, nimble fingers can't type as fast as they can talk, let alone think.

This mismatch between our Pentium chips and our Paleolithic bodies could be solved by physically integrating the two, the way I have cochlear implants inside me. Much as my implants make my brain "hear" sound, more advanced implants could one day evoke sensations of sight, touch and even feelings.

Or information could go the other way. For example, researchers at Brown University are implanting electrodes into the brains of people with paralyzed limbs to let them control computers and appliances with mental commands.

Consider where such technologies might go. Imagine someday being able to dictate e-mail with your thoughts, or thinking a Google search while walking down the street and "hearing" the answer read to you. Technologies like that could trigger changes in daily life even more profound than those unleashed by e-mail and the Web over the past 15 years.

Obviously, this scenario is an extrapolation from current technologies. But consider how far cochlear implants have come since 1978, when the first experimental multi-electrode device was surgically implanted in a patient. The device was so primitive that voices were barely intelligible, and the operation took eight hours. Compare that with my first implant surgery in 2001, which took 75 minutes. The second, in 2007, took 43 minutes. With both, I was listening to audiotapes within weeks.

Faster, pussycat.