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.
Wanting to re-enter the auditory world, Chorost received a cochlear implant. This computerized body part enabled him to hear again and gave him the honor of considering himself a cyborg, as well as the material for his first book, “Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human.”
Most people imagine that the deaf experience the world silently. However, when Chorost lost his hearing four years ago, he experienced everything but silence. He “heard,” among other sounds, the Jewish music and prayers he had studied in Hebrew school. Sounds — as a secular Jew — he hadn’t thought about in years.
Auditory hallucinations, he said, are common in people who go suddenly deaf, similar to amputees sensing phantom limbs.
“I was hearing orchestral music, grand soaring music, the soundtrack to ‘2001,’ ‘Ave Maria,'” he said. “Some of it was beautifully rendered.
“It was one of the most musical times of my life.”
Chorost knew he wasn’t losing his mind; he alternately enjoyed the hallucinations or tuned them out. It was like living above a busy street, he said, and forgetting about the street sounds below.
Google “cyborg” and one of the first hits will be a picture of a comic book muscle-man encased in machinery; hardly the image of Chorost, a self-proclaimed computer nerd with an advanced education and a Silicon Valley background. Now add to that list, author of a well-received memoir on a subject that people know little about.
He credits the implant as opening a literary door. “I feel like I was built to do this,” he said.
“It has let me become a writer,” he said. “I am part of a national conversation on technology. That’s a wonderful feeling.”
Central to the memoir is the emotional, philosophical and social transformation Chorost experienced when he went deaf.
At that time, Chorost had become frustrated with his dependence on computer technology for everything from dating to work to entertainment to correspondence. He’d spent his childhood sitting in front of a computer.
“It was a substitute for going out and engaging with the rest of the world,” he said.
He was both frightened and reluctant to become physically dependent on the one thing he wanted to veer away from. But he found that going deaf gave him an opportunity to redefine his place in the world and confront his love-hate relationship with technology.
“I think it was because I was rebuilding my world … there was this new sense of responsibility,” he said.
His connection with Judaism kept surfacing, particularly when he started working on his memoir. “It is one of the things I like about Judaism — the sense of personal responsibility. The world is yours to destroy or make. There’s no God in the sky who is going to swoop in.
“Going deaf and then gaining my hearing back was a process of rebuilding myself. I had to learn how to use the device … but there was also a spiritual process — a feeling of wonder, discovering, freshness.”
After receiving his implant, Chorost made changes in his life. He moved from the suburbs to the city; he avoided online dating; he joined writers groups and attended cultural events.
He describes feeling wonder everywhere; being able to hear a clock ticking on the other side of his office; hearing people talk down a hall from him — he assumed they were 15 feet away, but in actuality they were 100 feet away.
“Suddenly it was like having arms 20 times longer. I was learning new rules of the body that I was in. And I was able to make up rules, high frequency or low,” he said, laughing.
A cochlear implant is made up of three parts — a processor worn on a hip belt, the actual implant that has been embedded into the skull with electrodes that interact with the cochlea, and an apparatus that magnetizes to the implant on the outside of the skull, above the ear. Microphones in the external piece send sounds to the hip processor for analysis. The information is then streamed back to the implant where it is transmitted via the electrodes to the brain.
Software allows the “information” to become the sounds Chorost can hear. Getting the implant to work properly is a matter of constantly adjusting the software. And will Chorost ever hear the way that we do? Probably not.
However, Chorost continues to be pleased and intrigued with his new abilities.
“Hearing aids mark you as old and as debilitated,” he said. “But with the implant I can revision myself as part machine and part human and think about what it means to have a programmable body. It has changed the way I perceive the world.”