little m's world

here is a description of cochlear implants that i saw on another cochlear implant blog that i thought was good:

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 tail end, 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's important 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