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December 17, 2005
Ear implant gives woman hearing for first time ever
Madison: Kate Martinelli has been severely hearing impaired all her life. She'd never really heard the voices of her Mom, her siblings, her husband or her kids. All that changed Friday.
It was 10:30 a.m. Friday at UW Hospital, and Kate Martinelli was just a few minutes away from having her cochlear implant activated. "Be interesting to see what's out there," she said to her family in the waiting room.
She could have said it will be interesting to hear what's out there, because that's exactly what she'll be doing.
A few weeks ago Kate had a cochlear implant surgically placed in her head. The electronic device stimulates the undamaged fibers of her auditory nerve. Friday her receiver got activated.
For her part Kate wants to hear everyone's voice, and to find out how pretty her daughter Abby can sing. "Everybody says that she has a beautiful voice and that will be something for me to find out."
Her family can't wait. "It's almost like having a new lease, a new lease on life," says her mother Rita Britt.
"This is a great opportunity to improve Kate's quality of life," says her husband Dan.
Kate's brother John is especially excited. He got his own cochlear implant last spring and remembers when his receiver was turned on. "I went shhh. Oh my God. I can hear my own breathing and I can hear the friction of my own hand, of rubbing my shirt," recalls John Kinstler.
John remembers hearing everyone's voice for the first time, especially his mother's. "I said Mom is that you? She said yeah and I lost it. Because she has a British accent and I'd never heard that before."
At last it was time and the audiologist gave Kate one last warning. "It's going to sound really weird."
Kate's husband Dan spoke the first words. "1, 4, 3. Do you hear what I hear?"
"You sound weird," Kate replied. " What do you hear?" he asked. "You sound different," Kate said.
It was overwhelming, but John helped her through. "It felt like a twilight zone right now. Almost like a little echo. It's because your auditory nerves are being stimulated for the very first time. It's like ahhh," says John. "Your brain is just getting used to all this input and it's so confused right now."
What Kate was experiencing was normal. John says it will take a while for her brain to learn new sounds. He says he's still learning them all the time.
By Zac Schultz
http://nbc15.madison.com/news/headlines/2084587.html
Posted by 4HL on December 17, 2005 7:44 AM
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Comments
(I wanted to write in paragraphs but your comment form didn't let me, thus, dashes.)
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This sort of thing is very nice, but we should be fully aware of what we're entering into. Soon we are going to have replacements available for many different parts of our brains and bodies. Soon some of those replacements will come to be better in many respects than the original.
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It's easy to lay out a moral landscape if you're talking about restoring some minimal function to people who have none, but the terrain is going to slide into augmentation before we know what's happening. Some of the implications and consequences are obscured by the fact that cochlear implants (for instance) are a baby technology. Let's just not be blind to where we're going.
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We struggled for a long time to make implants that could make it possible to just barely understand speech. Now we're struggling with making implants that can reproduce music well enough to enjoy it. All fine, except that Moore's Law (& the other trends in miniturization of technology) means that there is no stopping point planned for this progression.
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The lines extrapolate quickly into people who can hear whispers from hundreds of yards away. There are no technical obstacles to people whose ears magically record everything they ever hear for review at leisure. At what point are people with normal hearing going to want to get implants? How hard will it be to stop them?
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<3
Posted by: mungojelly at December 17, 2005 12:38 PM