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The cochlear implant question

aeon.co

61–70 of 158 posts

Re: The cochlear implant question

#61
post #47

I feel like the narrative around disabled people has advanced to the point where some now insist that they aren't disabled. In reality, it's a pretty objective fact that being disabled means being unable to do something. It is a net negative on someone's quality of life. I'd be jolly pissed off if my parent decided not to get me an implant that enabled me to hear just because someone had told them that being deaf was…

There are ways you can present being deaf as an advantage.

I personally think it's excessively reductive, but there are those that say, for example, that you become more attuned to your other senses when you lose your hearing, or even that area of the brain can be repurposed for other tasks. They may say, therefore, that the only reason being deaf is a disability is because the world is designed for non-deaf people. In the same way that you wouldn't consider yourself disabled for being unable to see x-rays or detect magnetic fields.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My deaf coworker does not even know sign language, she uses phone for everything. She lives perfectly normal life. Entire office is not going to learn new language, just to speak with an odd deaf person. And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

Sign language is not gestures. This is covered in (among many other places) the introduction to the Wikipedia article on sign language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language

> a movement of part of the body, especially a hand or the head, to express an idea or meaning

Dictionary meaning of gesture.

> Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the *visual-manual modality to convey meaning*

From the introduction to the wikipedia article.

Sign language is definitely made of gestures, at least by my understood definition of the word gesture.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#63
post #28

I'd certainly urge someone to get a cochlear implant. Deafness and even being hard of hearing carries a known increased risk of dementia. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/want-to-reduce-your-risk...

This is a study of people in their 70s. The vast majority of people with hearing loss in their 70s lost it late in life; they have no Deaf/HH community, they almost never learn to sign, and they often struggle to adjust for their loss of hearing. The study you linked talks about reduced stimulation, and in particular _social_ stimulation: > when an individual suffers from moderate to severe hearing loss, they are les…

I 100% agree with the line you quote and refute in your reply, which I've repeated below...

> when an individual suffers from moderate to severe hearing loss, they are less likely to participate in social activities. Perhaps they are embarrassed about their hearing loss. Or they may simply find it unrewarding to attend a social event when they cannot hear what is going on.

This has been my life experience since the late 60's. It's my life right now.

You replied...

> People who are born deaf/hh , or who lose their hearing early in life, if they are allowed to access and participate Deaf/HH communities and spaces, simply do not have any of these difficulties in social contexts within those communities.

As someone who's been hard of hearing for most of their life, I'm curious exactly where these "HH communities" might have been in 1969, or the 70's, or 80's, or even now in the 2020's? Beyond the occasional subreddit that is. I suppose in elementary school the teachers could have put me in special ed classes. Or made me sit in the front of the class all the time. I'm glad they didn't do either.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#64
post #47

I feel like the narrative around disabled people has advanced to the point where some now insist that they aren't disabled. In reality, it's a pretty objective fact that being disabled means being unable to do something. It is a net negative on someone's quality of life. I'd be jolly pissed off if my parent decided not to get me an implant that enabled me to hear just because someone had told them that being deaf was…

Not being able to hear "normally" sucks. I only developed hearing loss later in life but it's bad enough not hearing everything, sometimes just nodding along when I don't hear something because I already asked a hundred times that day and feel embarrassed about it. Not being talked to by others because they feel like you don't understand them. It's a huge disadvantage in terms of mental health and socializing. Imagining having that condition as a kid breaks my heart.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#66
post #47

I feel like the narrative around disabled people has advanced to the point where some now insist that they aren't disabled. In reality, it's a pretty objective fact that being disabled means being unable to do something. It is a net negative on someone's quality of life. I'd be jolly pissed off if my parent decided not to get me an implant that enabled me to hear just because someone had told them that being deaf was…

While I'd agree with your point for a hearing aid, as per the article:

> While hearing aids are relatively speaking uncontroversial, the internal portion of a cochlear implant requires surgery, which of course entails risk

I don't know the scope of that risk. Might be fine, but the point is you have to actually find out what it is before doing it.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#67
post #47

I feel like the narrative around disabled people has advanced to the point where some now insist that they aren't disabled. In reality, it's a pretty objective fact that being disabled means being unable to do something. It is a net negative on someone's quality of life. I'd be jolly pissed off if my parent decided not to get me an implant that enabled me to hear just because someone had told them that being deaf was…

Tangential, but I’m just going to point out that severe autism is absolutely debilitating. I think many people have only known people with what used to be called Asperger’s and don’t realize just how bad it can get.

My cousin with it needs to live in a group home. He’s barely verbal.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#68
post #56

Anyone here with SSHL have experience with CI? I've heard mixed things due to the rather different sound experience vs natural hearing.

I don't have personal experience with CI, but have researched it extensively as a potential fix for my hearing loss. From what I understand, the number of electrodes or links to neural tissue is the limiting factor. With something like NeuraLink with 1024 electrodes, the resolution of the sound signal can be much higher. For something like early cochlear implants, with 8 or 12 channels, the signal is going to be very digitized and artificial sounding; you have to heavily optimize for a particular type or modality of sound, and that's usually speech. That means all sorts of nuance things like music and voices get lost in compression, or filtered out entirely.

Cochlear implants are essentially BCI implants, taking the place of the cochlea in signaling via neural tissue.

To completely replicate natural sound, you'd likely need somewhere between 15,000 to 30,000 electrodes. It's not linear, however, and 8-12 electrodes might get you to sound that is about 25% of normal, and 1024 will get you to 85-90% normal. Full fidelity of sound, or even better, will be possible once we get implants working with many tens of thousands of electrodes. People will have senses that far exceed biological human limitations.

One neat thing with all of this is that due to plasticity, any connections on the neocortex can be trained to behave as if they're wired to any sensory organ; there aren't any hard limits on where an implant has to be connected. If you had an implant with 50k electrodes, half of them could be dedicated to sound, and the other half to sci-fi level possibilities like BCI mouse and keyboard control, simple virtual displays through modified sight, secondary audio channels, North sense, radar, electromagnetic signals, or immersion tweaks that modulate proprioceptive signaling.

1-500k would allow for convincing replication of normal sight, with the obvious advantage that with everything being digital, you'd be able to process your vision in software (Please watch this ad before waking! Skip in 10...).

With a million electrodes, you could get into convincing totally immersive full sensory simulation. There would be some resolution issues, initially, but we're some materials science, software design, and engineering problems away from full Matrix style simulations. 1 sq cm of neocortex is all you'd need for access to 1 million neurons - things are pretty densely packed, and all the neurons we need to access live on the outer surface of the brain.

Things are gonna start improving and the rate will accelerate, so hopefully we start seeing radical doublings of cochlear implant and other BCI capabilities in the near future.

TLDR; as much of normal hearing as possible is compressed down to around 100hz over 8-12 electrodes in a cochlear implant. This results in significant quality degradation compared to normal hearing, but it can be a huge boon to someone who is totally or profoundly deaf. Implant technology is experiencing a boom, and we're going to see a period of Moore's law like scaling of electrodes until implants reach parity with the rest of our computing technology.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#69

As the hearing brother of a deaf sister with hearing parents, what I usually tell people is to learn sign language and get the cochlear. Forcing only cochlear on the child means that the family does not live in the deaf world with their child, while only speaking SL might distance them and cause them to miss out on a lot in the hearing world. It reminds me of basque spain, where everyone speaks catalan and some peopl…

This seems like a really thoughtful compromise, a meeting-in-the-middle that keeps optionality as open as possible for the child.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#70
post #59

My wife and I faced a similar situation and found it a simple decision. We both carry GJB-2 gene mutations that will likely result in profound non-syndromic hearing loss. We went through Orchid Health to get a whole genome sequence of our prospective embryos and then selected one that was not affected by the condition. We have 1 more carrier girl and 2 more unaffected girls to work with, and if we want boys later in…

How much money do things like this end up costing?
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