Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

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After my cochlear implant operation I volunteered to participate in an in-depth research study to collect data on post-op outcomes for cochlear implant recipients (coincidentally at the Eye & Ear hospital in Melbourne where the multi-channel cochlear implant was invented and first implanted in 1978 by Graeme Clark).

I did a whole raft of audiology tests and for the speech comprehension tests in particular I scored 90%+ compared to people with normal hearing. (They're tough tests too, trying to pick out a sentence from a lot of background noise which is a worst-case scenario for hard of hearing people.)

I was told that my outcome was better than average, but I was a younger than average adult recipient given than I was in my early 40's, compared to most (in Australia at least) who are 60+.

And yes I can now distinguish all notes on a piano.

Thanks for sharing. This is getting into territory that non-musically trained hearing people would probably have difficultly, but can you distinguish between a C major chord and a C minor chord? And do you have any other feelings about it, like one sounding sad or happy?

I don't think any of this is particularly relevant to understanding spoken language, but I'm just curious about your outcome.

I'd be surprised if a majority of current CI users could distinguish e.g. middle C from C# (not identify the note, but just perceive a difference between them), but I don't know that many CI users.

Yes, I can distinguish between a C major chord and a C minor chord. I took piano lessons as a kid and learned some formal music theory.

Note though that I had perfectly normal hearing until my late 30s, and only have an implant in one ear. After my implant operation my brain "knew" what it should be hearing from the implant signal. This is apparently true of many adult CI recipients and the unexpected plasticity of adult brains to adjust to the CI signal is an active area of research.

I think that the typical outcomes for people who have cochlear implants when they are born deaf would be quite different to adult recipients like me who grew up with normal hearing.

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