What’s it like to learn to hear? Alex, who has had a cochlear implant for four years, gave some information on his experience.

“The kind of deafness I have is when the cochlea hair cells gets damaged and can no longer function properly. There are a variety of reasons why that would occur but in my case it was due to an overdose of an ototoxic (toxic to the ear) antibiotic.” Alex received a cochlear implant, on the left side, at age eighteen.

Cochlear implants collect sound, process it (for example to pick up speech patterns) and transmit these signals to an internal part which is surgically implanted. Electrodes in the inner ear stimulate the auditory nerve, which carries these signals to the brain. However, like learning to read a new language, the brain does not immediately know how to interpret the new input.

“A cochlear implant basically is a whole new way of hearing since the auditory nerve is electrically stimulated. You basically have to learn how to hear again. I had 9 months of getting used to it before I could get the most out of it but that figure depends entirely on the person. I didn't have therapy in the traditional sense, you can't directly teach someone to hear. In order to help I kept the implant on then stimulated my brain with as much sound as I possibly can get. Anything from music to movies to audiobooks - Stephen Fry's narration of Harry Potter was my main go to.”

How does the implant differ, in terms of how the experience of sound, to a traditional amplification based hearing aid? “Well the implant is completely different from a hearing aid. It's more of a prosthesis since it's how I hear, not just an aid. But I can't just tell you how different it is either, that'd be like me trying to describe the colour red. I can say that, in my case, it is much clearer and supports more of the higher frequencies that an aid couldn't for me.” However, Alex thinks there’s still a place for hearing aids: “I wouldn't choose to implant my other ear though, the hearing aid provides a huge amount of depth to the sound as well as the bass tones.”

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