Needswhippedcream

Historical? I always thought it'd be nice to have a button or an extra in the menu that takes you to a drop down where you can select a character's name and it'll take you to the Wikipedia page.

It warms my heart every time someone gets curious and you take the time to explain.

It can get repetitive but curiosity is beautiful.

I was born deaf, and got cochlear implants a couple years ago. I'm curious about your thoughts regarding deafness and how I might be less developed than the regular person who has access to sounds.

What are your thoughts on a mind that has not been shaped by sounds? I must admit, i feel sort of inferior after reading many of your comments because sound is everything to you. I don't feel incomplete; just really out of touch.

Or maybe I'm kidding myself; I know exactly what I'm missing now that I have the implant and take solace in the fact that I'm rediscovering what others take for granted.

What are your thoughts about someone like me who uses the cochlear implant but was born deaf?

I must say that after 4 years of using the implant, I can feel myself becoming more and more..... Hearing? I'm always feeling at the brink of truly understanding speech. Just today, I was watching a tutorial on how to play the violin by youtuber "fiddlerman". He was doing that thing with "row row row your boat" and while working on the computer, I could grasp some words as if by magic, out of thin ear.

I lost the grip but then switched over to a video of this old woman teaching violin basics. Hearing her voice while she was explaining the chords, I could catch her explaining how to hold the violin and support it while picking at the string. Then the ability to hear the words slip back into noise that barely turned into words.

What can I read up on, what can I look for more information on how the mind translates sounds into words? I would listen to YouTube and watch the mouth move, listen to music with lyrics and listen to them over and over - to the point where it drives my wife crazy because she's hearing and does not want to listen to "somewhere over the rainbow" for the 100th time in 3 days. Each time I play it, the music sounds new to me but the voice amazingly turns into words... Mainly because I memorized the lyrics and allowed my mind to sift through the music instruments and manage to visualize the words in my mind.

I am utterly fascinated by this process because I have used ASL my whole life as a first language and my pronouncing was merely an art form of mimicking what I was told that sounded correct. The implant came a long way in showing me how to say words and hear the difference. I want to go further and higher into this mystery.

My god, you know so much. I'm a cochlear implant user on the Nucleus 5 and your description about perception is definitely spot on.

I don't feel bad that the machine isn't perfect. It's like wearing a mechanical leg.. Maybe I walk funny but I'm mobile, comfortable, and filled with nothing but curiosity.

I'm gonna buy your book the first thing in the morning. I wish to know more and understand sounds.