I just picked up Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, and it is a revelation. Sacks is a physician and neurological specialist who has written extensively on previously unexplained phenomena with the brain. His book Awakenings, about coma patients who were administered a drug and awakened, returning briefly to normal lives, only to tragically lapse back into their comas when the drugs wore off, was made into a major motion picture with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams in 1990. Musicophilia is a big book about how the brain assimilates, creates, and otherwise processes music. Because of Sacks’s passion for understanding how the brain interacts with the physical world, it has a lot of information on how the brain works with the hearing organs to process sound and interpret what we hear. Most exciting to me, it hints at some of the reasons why I’ve experienced a marked improvement over the past several years in my ability to hear -- not music, which is still gone completely for me, but to hear and understand people’s voices – even when my physical hearing tests have shown no improvement and even slight decline in hearing levels in both ears. Sacks is making me wonder whether the amazing human brain actually has the ability to correct and “cure” hearing loss to some degree, even when the physical hearing organs are damaged beyond repair.
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Posted by David on Dec 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
We Are Up And Running Again
You may have seen a temporary notice yesterday that our web-hosting company had made a bone-headed mistake that meant we couldn't make changes or updates to Hearing Mojo. Happily, they fixed the problem after initially telling me it was unfixable and that I'd have to shut down the site entirely and start over. Hearing Mojo has doubled its traffic in the past six months and I've been adding more content, so it's getting more complex to manage. I'm also just starting to host some advertisements, which is great news because they will pay for some investments I want to make in better systems and more content. So please bear with me when things go wrong, and thanks for all the comments and feedback when things go right.
Posted by David on Oct 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
My Dad's Hearing Loss Is A Challenge Our Family Confronted Together
By Jake Copithorne
"I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" my dad asked for the third time. The line at the bookstore was growing at an alarming pace. Six, seven, eight people were waiting behind us now, more agitated by the minute.
"There is a special today. Since you bought six books, you can get one of these two bags for free. Which--would--you--like?" The last sentence was punctuated with loud, arrogant condescension in each drawn-out word. I could feel my tension rising to the point where my heart raced and my stomach churned. I was angry at the cashier and embarrassed for my dad. The line began to push, and the cashier was rude, impatient, and at the edge of his tolerance level....
It was Dad's first day out of the house after suddenly losing much of his hearing three months before. The doctor said it was probably a combination of Meniere's disease and autoimmune inner ear disease--a stress-related disease in which your immune system mistakes your good hearing cells for being unhealthy and attacks them. The disease often leads to a total loss of hearing. It is not well understood, and there's no known cure.
The loss of Dad's hearing was not only a challenge that he had to overcome, but a challenge for everyone in the family. I was only thirteen at the time, but I quickly started to understand firsthand how the world treats people who have disabilities.
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Posted by David on Aug 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
Introducing Jake Copithorne, Our Summer Intern At Hearing Mojo
The more news, information and stories we post on Hearing Mojo, the more interest there is in the site. Traffic has doubled in recent months and a lot of readers have emailed. Keeping a blog fed can take up a lot of time, so I've brought in some help this summer. My son Jake is entering his senior year in high school and has been helping me out. Now I've asked him to start writing about some of his experiences and also to help research and write news about products and hearing-loss issues. The next post will be his first. Stay tuned!
Posted by David on Aug 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Joining The Hearing Mainstream, Or, How I Got My Mojo Back (Hearing Mojo, That Is)
It’s been a long while since I last posted. That’s because I have spent the last six months ramping my marketing and communications consulting business, Aquarius Advisers, to the next level. I’ve now got two partners and we’ve taken some nice space in a nineteenth-century manufacturing building in the Kendall Square area in Cambridge, Mass. Kendall Square is next to MIT and a hotbed of high technology and biotechnology research. We have several technology start-up clients as well as some major corporate clients. In short, I’ve gone “mainstream,” meaning I try to go about my regular business activities without letting my hearing impediment get in the way. It’s been an exciting challenge, and it’s given me plenty to write about for Hearing Mojo in the coming weeks and months.
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Posted by David on Apr 18, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Back At It: Good News, Bad News, And Good News
I've taken a break from Hearing Mojo recently, which is good news, bad news, and then good news. Good news: I've been very busy with my "day job" running Aquarius Advisers, my corporate communications consulting firm. For the longest time I was severely hampered in doing this business because it was so hard to use the phone, work in group meetings, etc. But to my amazement I continue to move higher up the coping curve and am finding myself able to communicate and understand much more in situations where just a few months ago I was totally lost. My hearing isn't any better and in fact has gotten a little worse, but my comprehension generally continues to improve.
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Posted by David on Jul 20, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
Hyper-Vigilance Is The Price Of Independence For Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing People
I can relate to Thomas Jefferson's warning that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. You need only look as far as the recent headlines about Miss Deaf Texas, killed by a train as she was distracted by text messaging while crossing some railroad tracks, to see why I regard hyper-vigilance as the price of my independence as a hard-of-hearing person. Yesterday, when my son and I crossed the street at a relatively quiet intersection in Boston, I realized how hyper-alertness has become an unconscious habit for me -- the only way to assure security in what too often is a physically dangerous everyday world for someone who can't hear. It can literally save your life.
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Posted by David on Apr 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
How To Buy A Hearing Aid If You've Never Had One Before
There are a million ways to buy hearing aids these days. You can buy them through the mail or on the web, you can go to an audiologist, or you can visit a professional dispenser who is a certified hearing professional. You can even go to a kiosk in a department store. And it's a confusing process. Higher costs don't always mean the right product or the right fit. Lower prices don't always mean a worse product. With so many choices, the operating principal is "Buyer beware!" In my recent search for a new set of hearing aids, I discovered some of the latest and greatest information sources for first-time buyers who need authoritative information to get them off on the right foot. Click on the link below to the full article for some helpful hints and useful resources.
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Posted by David on Feb 21, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
A Magician's Secret Revealed: The Amazing Auditory Sleight-Of-Hand Of Speech Reading
Last night at dinner with our friends Linda and Turner, I had an insight into how the magic of speech reading works. Turner is a tennis pro who has traveled the world; he is a collector and breeder of rare praying mantises; he is the owner of a collection of 300 boomerangs which he is skilled at throwing and catching; and he is a trained magician. When Turner showed us some amazing sleight-of-hand tricks, I realized they rely on the same mechanism in the brain that switches on and off when you learn to speech-read. Speech reading truly is a magical process. When I lost one of my hearing aids a week ago, I thought about crawling under the covers and hiding until my audiologist could get replacements delivered. I didn't have a clue about how I would cope. But instead of hiding, I gamely went about my business. To my surprise, I discovered that in the three years since I lost most of my hearing, I've learned to cope far better than I knew. Like magic, my speech-reading skills have improved dramatically.
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Posted by David on Nov 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Excuse Me, I Have To Fall Down Now
Right after college, I had three roommates in their first year of medical school. Once a week, one of them would run up from the mailbox shouting, "MMWR is here! MMWR is here!" Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the newsletter from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), chronicles every known malady afflicting the populace, providing graphic details of the latest horrific diseases and extensive weekly documentation of Who and How Many are Dying from What and Why. My doctor-to-be roommates pored over it. But I never saw the appeal until many years later, when as a sufferer of Meniere's Disease I started reading with ghoulish fascination every issue of On the Level, the quarterly newsletter of the Vestibular Disorders Association (VEDA). This week's mail brought the Spring 2005 issue, which carries three full pages of the most graphic descriptions I've read of the vertigo problems that accompany Meniere's: "In the early acute stages, people may be consumed with rock-bottom physical and medical issues, struggling just to get under control things like balance, nausea, vomiting, and headaches....It doesn't go on like that forever; sooner or later, the basic physical symptoms, with trial and error and ongoing treatment, will be brought under at least adequate control. Then you are in for the longer haul, dealing with the cognitive, memory and attention problems, the impact on your life, the limitations on activity you may have....
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Posted by David on May 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Resources: About.com
Jamie Berke is one of the 475 "guides" at About.com, a website that offers personal advice on everything from table tennis to headaches. She was deafened in the Rubella outbreak in the '60s and has degrees from Gaulladet University, the leading institution devoted to deaf studies. She is About.com's "deafness/hard of hearing" guide (http://deafness.about.com) and provides a wealth of advice and information on how to cope with hearing loss.
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Posted by David on Mar 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Resources: SHHH
As often as possible, I will post on HearingMojo.com links to other sources of information, along with brief descriptions on how and why I've found them useful. The first place anyone experiencing hearing loss should go is Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH) at www.shhh.org. It is the largest service and organization for people with hearing loss. It has a technology center that assesses the latest assistive listening devices, a lobbying group that follows and supports legislation in Washington and the state capitols, several publications and newsletters that provide a wealth of useful information, and its own weblog with multiple discussion sites. It also sponsors research on issues and technologies such as cochlear implants. And it has an annual national conference with educational seminars and a trade-show floor where vendors display their products.
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Posted by David on Mar 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
