Institute For The Future

Michael Chorost and the cyborg memoir

I recently agreed to review Michael Chorost's Rebuilt for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Since it's a very interesting book, and deals with subjects that should interest IFTF members, I'm posting a preview of it below.

 

Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

In July 2001, Michael Chorost, a writer and researcher at SRI, a Silicon Valley research center, became deaf; that fall, he became a cyborg. In a normally-functioning ear, sound waves are translated into electrical impulses by thousands of tiny hairs in the cochlea, a snail shell-shaped organ linking the ear to the brain. An illness destroyed the functionality of the hairs in Chorost's cochlea, but the nerves that connected it to the brain were undamaged; thus he was a candidate for a cochlear implant, an electronic device that picks up sounds, digitally processes them, and then transmits them to sixteen electrodes that connect to the cochlear nerves. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human is Chorost's account of learning to hear again. Funny and thoughtful, it is an extended meditation on the nature of perception, the human brain, and the relationship between technology and humanity.

The term "cyborg" is familiar from science fiction and academic studies. Some use it to refer to any combination of humans and machines: by this standard, someone wearing glasses or brushing their teeth is a cyborg. Wrong, Chorost argues: to be a cyborg, you need a technology that "exerts control of some kind over the body." In his case, the cochlear implant mediates between him and the world of sound; he hears through a tangle of silicon, wire, and code. "The computer's playing my ear," he says when the implant is first activated.

But the implant alone doesn't make him a cyborg. Sixteen electrodes don't produce the same signals that thousands of hairs do, and Chorost has to learn how to interpret the new signals. "My hearing had not been restored," he says, "it had been replaced, with an entirely new system that had entirely new rules." Some of this happens consciously, but much of it happens at the neural level, as his brain learns to associate new signals—friends' voices, rustling paper, NPR's All Things Considered—with familiar sounds. As he discovers, his new hearing balances on a fulcrum of hardware, software, and his own brain: incredibly, the implant comes with two different software programs to control the electrodes, which interpret sound in very different ways. Different programs produce different auditory worlds, and different realities.

The experience of learning to hear again is challenging, and even at its best, the result "would not be hearing. It would just be equivalent to hearing." He soon finds that "[u]pgrading myself was slow, hard, subtle work;" to succeed, "I would have to become emotionally open to what I heard, instead of fighting against it."

The challenge of making human meaning in a world of zeroes and ones colors other parts of Chorost's life, and his attitude toward the ambivalent gift of technology. He signs up for online dating services, but discovers that they reduce people to a set of formal coordinates—height, eye color, profession—that give the appearance of increasing the precision of matchmaking, while actually short-circuiting the slow, serendipitous processes and reinforcements of community and kin that normally bring and bind people together. (Ellen Ullman's classic Close to the Machine drew similar parallels between technological obsession and private passion.) Hearing, deafness, and community are also deeply intertwined. In one brilliant passage, Chorost notes that "[s]ocial norms are not taught, they are overhead, but the one thing even the most skilled deaf people cannot do is overhear." But the deaf community in America is a group whose "warmth, intimacy, and cohesiveness… are legendary," and who have turned American Sign Language into a remarkably expressive medium. Over the long run, cochlear implants are probably going to spell its end—yet another community of Others destroyed by the spread of technology.

Rebuilt may be the first of a new genre, the cyborg memoir. But it certainly won't be the last. Every era has its characteristic stories of trial and transformation: at various times, religious meditations, war memoirs, travelogues, or other tales have best fit the logic of the age. Thanks to a blend of demographics and technological advance, we can expect an avalanche of stories of transformations that are equal parts technological, neurological, and social. Theodore Roszak argued in The Longevity Revolution (a sequel to his influential 1968 The Making of a Counter-Culture) that aging Baby Boomers will embrace implants and genetic modification to remain healthy and independent in their old age. Medical advances are turning formerly life-threatening medical crises brought on by advancing age or injury (just look at how many soldiers serving in Iraq survive injuries that would have killed their fathers in Korea or Vietnam). What was once a rare or easily marginalized experience will become a rite of passage, as millions of us entering our last decades learn to walk again, or see, or hear again. The challenge will not just be to recover, but to rebuild, and to draw what wisdom we can from the experience. Memoirs like Rebuilt will be invaluable guides to this new territory.

Four years later, Chorost hears pretty well. More important, "my bionic hearing made me… more human, because I was constantly aware that my perception of the universe was provisional, the result of human decisions that would be revised time and again…. [I]t was my task as a human being to strive to connect ever more complexly and deeply with the people and places of my life." This awareness of the fragility and uniqueness of life, bought by a hard effort to overcome its limits, strikes me as the perfect answer to opponents of implants and genetic modification, who worry about the effect of such tinkerings on our selves and souls. Such technologies needn't make us less than human. As Chorost shows, the experience of becoming a cyborg can bring us back in touch with our humanity.

 

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