No hearing without signals: imagining and reimagining transductions through the history of the cochlear implant

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore a set of conceptual and technoscientific shifts that led to reconsiderations of the experience of hearing over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and most specifically, hearing through the use of cochlear implants (CIs). In doing so, we focus on the factors that are thought to contribute to CI users’ experiences of sound, including their potentially distinctive sensoria and neural profiles, as they navigate the spaces of their day-to-day lives as both the bearers of objective audiograms and subjective listeners. These factors are increasingly broad, ranging from age of implantation, electroacoustic stimulation sent from the device, and cognitive profiles considered to correlate with complex developmental processes related to early sound environments and language exposure (oral or manual). Hearing, in this perspective, is a phenomenon that varies between individuals, over the course of the life (or day) of a single person, and according to experiences with auditory devices. Such a conceptualization undermines dichotomous representations of hearing and deafness and an increasingly substantial gray zone emerges between the two. Both are ever more conceived of as developmental processes in which a variety of signals and their transductions are considered central to understandings of how experiences of hearing take shape.

KEYWORDS:

• Deafness
• cochlear implants
• hearing
• signals
• transductions
• sensory experiences
• neurosciences
• medical anthropology
• science and technology studies
• biosocial research

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Chani Bonventre for her contributions to this article, Mara Mills and Stefan Helmreich for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, and our two anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights which improved the article. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) provided funding for the project “When Deaf People Hear: A Study at the Intersection of Neuroplasticity, Technological Interventions, and Experiences in the Grey Zone of Deaf and Hearing” (reference number: 430-2017-00209; co-principal investigator Michele Friedner, University of Chicago).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Attendance of the conference predated the current project. The explanations of deafness, hearing, and hearing with CIs presented at the conference raised questions for Lloyd that led to the project “When deaf people hear” (with co-principal investigator Michele Friedner). She is the parent of two deaf children.

2. Interviews were carried out in Canada, the United States, and Australia with researchers whose interests range from stem cell therapies to the development of bionic technologies to psychosocial outcomes of children who use CIs.

3. Highly specific and necessarily partial measurement of hearing.

4. Some researchers have argued that oral and manual languages should be considered wholly distinct, with use of the latter thought to undermine oral language outcomes (e.g. Doucet et al. 2006). These contentions have been questioned by researchers who assert that language is language and that both (oral or manual) contribute to developmental processes that facilitate hearing and language development via a CI (Lyness et al. 2013).

5. For a more in-depth discussion of Wever and Bray’s experiments and the “telephone theory of hearing” see Sterne (2009) and Mills (2014). Media and communications scholar Mara Mills has noted that while Wever and Bray’s work had a great deal of influence on subsequent research on hearing and understandings of the way the ear operated, their findings were quickly disproven (Mills 2014, 267).

6. At this point in experimentations with the reproduction of sound, scientists attempted to stimulate many parts of the inner ear as well as the brain stem, but the cochlea remained the main objective for interventions (e.g. Djourno, Eyriès, and Vallancien 1957).

7. In raising these points, we call attention to significant debates within disability studies, deaf studies, and contemporary audiology and neuroscience research. Tensions related to the type of intervention that should be prioritized and concerns about the erasure of Deaf identity and culture have been discussed by activist and Deaf studies scholars for the past three decades. Deaf Studies scholars have also distanced themselves from disability studies, as they do not consider deafness to be a disability. For further reading see Valente, Bahan, and Bauman (2011) and Leigh and O’Brian (2019).

8. Over time, children became the focus of a significant proportion of CI research. Prelingually implanted children are often thought to be more comparable because they are considered a more homogenous cohort than adults. Creating “hearing futures” for this population has been a priority in CI research.

9. It is difficult to know what people hear using CIs and experiences of the stimulation they produce are variable, in part affected by previous experiences of sound. Recent research among people with single-sided deafness suggests that the sound produced by CIs may resemble muffled acoustic sound. In the case of children who are implanted and who had no previous experience of sound, the lack of common experiences between them and acoustic hearers make it impossible to know what they hear.

10. There exist differences of opinion with respect to the redundant nature of sensory information.

11. Similar research exists on neuropsychological differences in deaf populations (Hauser and Marschark 2008).

12. While we use the term “hearing” in this text, some people with CIs reject the application of the term “hearing” to describe their experiences, whether because they report hearing nothing with CIs (perhaps environmental sounds at most) or because they do not self-identify as members of the hearing population (Friedner 2022).

13. Moreover, with fewer children who use CIs in specialized schools for the deaf, a greater responsibility for enacting learning environments is placed on families.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Lloyd

Stephanie Lloyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval (Québec, Canada) whose research sits at the intersection of medical anthropology and science and technology studies. Through two main research axes, her work explores (1) narratives emerging from neuroscience and epigenetics research on trajectories of neurobiological risk whose extreme end point is considered suicide, and (2) perceptions and experiences of hearing through cochlear implants (CIs), from the perspective of neuroscience and audiology researchers and CI users. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, among other funding bodies. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society.

Alexandre Tremblay

Alexandre Tremblay is a Master’s student in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval. His research focuses on the practical, epistemological and ethical dimensions of microbiome and mental health multidisciplinary research carried out in collaboration with Inuit communities in Nunavik. His Master’s thesis is tentatively titled “Quand la flore intestinale nous définit: à la recherche de la signature du risque de santé mentale chez les Inuit.” He has worked on the project “When Deaf People Hear” since 2017.