aids wouldn’t be of any use for him now; after all, they work by capturing sound from the world and blasting it at higher volume into the ailing auditory system. This strategy is effective for some types of hearing loss, but it only works if everything downstream of the eardrum is functioning. If the inner ear is defunct, no amount of amplification solves the problem. And this was Michael’s situation. It seemed as though his perception of the world’s soundscapes had come to an end.
But then he found out about a single remaining possibility, and in 2001 he underwent surgery for a cochlear implant. This tiny device circumvents the broken hardware of the inner ear to speak directly to the functioning nerve (think of it like a data cable) just beyond it. The implant is a minicomputer lodged directly into his inner ear; it receives sounds from the outside world and passes the information to the auditory nerve by means of tiny electrodes.
So the damaged part of the inner ear is bypassed, but that doesn’t mean the experience of hearing comes for free. Michael had to learn to interpret the foreign language of the electrical signals being fed to his auditory system:
When the device was turned on a month after surgery, the first sentence I heard sounded like “Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?” My brain gradually learned how to interpret the alien signal. Before long, “Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?” became “What did you have for breakfast?” After months of practice, I could use the telephone again, even converse in loud bars and cafeterias.
Although being implanted with a minicomputer sounds something like science fiction, cochlear implants have been on the market since 1982, and more than half a million people are walking around with these bionics in their heads, enjoying voices and door knocks and laughter and piccolos. The software on the cochlear implant is hackable and updateable, so Michael has spent years getting more efficient information through the implant without further surgeries. Almost a year after the implant was activated, he upgraded to a program that gave him twice the resolution. As Michael puts it, “While my friends’ ears will inevitably decline with age, mine will only get better.”
Terry Byland lives near Los Angeles. He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder of his retina, the sheet of photoreceptors at the back of the eye. He reports, “Aged 37, the last thing you want to hear is that you are going blind—that there’s nothing they can do.”2
But then he discovered that there was something he could do, if he was brave enough to try it. In 2004, he became one of the first patients to undergo an experimental procedure: getting implanted with a bionic retinal chip. A tiny device with a grid of electrodes, it plugs into the retina at the back of the eye. A camera on glasses wire-lessly beams its signals to the chip. The electrodes give little zaps of electricity to Terry’s surviving retinal cells, generating signals along the previously silent highway of the optic nerve. After all, Terry’s optic nerve functioned just fine: even while the photoreceptors had died, the nerve remained hungry for signals it could carry to the brain.
A research team at the University of Southern California implanted the miniature chip in Terry’s eye. The surgery was completed without a hitch, and then the real testing began. With hushed anticipation, the research team turned on the electrodes individually to test them. Terry reported, “It was amazing to see something. It was like little specks of light—not even the size of a dime—when they were testing the electrodes one by one.”
Over the course of days, Terry experienced only small constellations of lights: not a rousing success. But his visual cortex gradually figured out how to extract better information out of the signals. After some time, he detected the presence of his eighteen-year-old son: “I was with my son, walking . . . it was the first time I had seen him since he was five years old. I don’t mind saying, there were a few tears wept that day.”
Terry wasn’t experiencing a clear visual picture—it was more like a simple pixelated grid—but the door of darkness had swung open a crack. Over time, his brain has been able to make better sense of the signals. While he can’t ascertain the details of individual faces, he can make them out dimly. And although the resolution of his retinal chip is low, he can touch objects presented at random locations and is able to cross a city street by discerning the white lines of the crosswalk.3 He proudly reports, “When I’m in my home, or another person’s house, I can go into any room and switch the light on, or see the light coming in through the window. When I am walking along the street I can avoid low hanging branches—I can see the edges of the branches, so I can avoid them.”
These digital devices push information that doesn’t quite match the language of the natural biology. Nevertheless, the brain figures out how to make use of the data.
The idea of prostheses for the ear and eye had been seriously considered in the scientific community for decades. But no one was positive that these technologies would work. After all, the inner ear and the retina perform astoundingly sophisticated processing on the sensory input they receive. So would a small electronic chip, speaking the dialect of Silicon Valley instead of the language of our natural biological sense organs, be understood by the rest of the brain? Or instead, would its patterns of miniature electrical sparks come off as gibberish to downstream neural networks? These devices would be like an uncouth traveler to a foreign land who expects that everyone will figure out his language if he just keeps shouting it.
Amazingly, in the case of the brain, such an unrefined strategy works: the rest of the country learns to understand the foreigner.
But how?
The key to understanding this requires diving one level deeper: your three pounds of brain tissue are not directly hearing or seeing any of the world around you. Instead, your brain is locked in a crypt of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables. That’s all it has to work with.
In ways we are still working to understand, the brain is stunningly gifted at taking in these signals and extracting patterns. To those patterns it assigns meaning. With the meaning you have subjective experience. The brain is an organ that converts sparks in the dark into the euphonious picture show of your world. All of the hues and aromas and emotions and sensations in your life are encoded in trillions of signals zipping in blackness, just as a beautiful screen saver on your computer screen is fundamentally built of zeros and ones.
THE PLANET-WINNING TECHNOLOGY OF THE POTATO HEAD
Imagine you went to an island of people born blind. They all read by Braille, feeling tiny patterns of inputs on their fingertips. You watch them break into laughter or melt into sobs as they brush over the small bumps. How can you fit all that emotion into the tip of your finger? You explain to them that when you enjoy a novel, you aim the spheres on your face toward particular lines and curves. Each sphere has a lawn of cells that record collisions with photons, and in this way you can register the shapes of the symbols. You’ve memorized a set of rules by which different shapes represent different sounds. Thus, for each squiggle you recite a small sound in your head, imagining what you would hear if someone were speaking aloud. The resulting pattern of neurochemical signaling makes you explode with hilarity or burst into tears. You couldn’t blame the islanders for finding your claim difficult to understand.
You and they would finally have to allow a simple truth: the fingertip or the eyeball is just the peripheral device that converts information from the outside world into spikes in the brain. The brain then does all the hard work of interpretion. You and the islanders would break bread over the fact that in the end it’s all about the trillions of spikes racing around in the brain—and that the method of entry simply
