Hearing with a CI

I just read this post from a mom on one of the list serves to which I belong. It is very interesting and it may help us understand what Mikaela will and will not hear with the CI. Some of you have asked me how will her hearing be different than natural hearing. This does a good job of creating a visual picture what I understand hearing to be with the CI.

This is a quote from Dr. Patricia Spencer:

I'll try to make a visual picture that relates to the way sound is heard by a child with a cochlear implant. Suppose that you have to identify a four-legged animal, and you've not seen that animal before but you have to figure out what it is. Maybe you have to draw it. Maybe you have to learn the name for it. Now that animal is standing in back of a bunch of trees. To see that animal, you have to look through tree trunks that are hiding big parts of that animal.

Now, if you were looking through those trees with the equivalent of a hearing aid, you could probably only see the tail end of that animal because you could only hear the low frequencies with that hearing aid. With a cochlear implant, though, you can see pieces of that animal's head, pieces of its neck, its legs, its body, pieces of its tailend, but you still are missing pieces in between each of those that you see. The reason I'm bringing this up for you to think about is because it'simportant for us to realize that children who are using cochlear implants still don't see the whole animal. They see more of a range of that animal but they have to use their brains. They have to use what they already know about the world. They have to use their cognitive abilities to fill in those gaps to be able to put together a picture of that whole animal. That's the kind of task that a child is facing using a cochlear implant. -Dr. Patricia Spencer, Professor, Department of Social Work, Gallaudet University

The sounds Mikaela will hear are not as rich and full as normal hearing. I often describe it to be like a transister radio from 'back in the day'. I do understand that the brain can learn to fill in what the CI doesn't deliver and I am hopeful that as technology increases over the years that it will improve for her. I am very interested to hear what you think of this. Please feel free to comment.