Normal hearing has 30,000 hairs, that's 15,000 hairs each ear. No CI has more than 22 electrodes but even that is better when you have no hairs, or at least no normally functioning hairs. HAs can't replace hairs, they simply amplify and stimulate the few damaged hairs you have left. CI destroys those few hairs and takes the place of the hairs and stimulates your nerves directly.
I was looking in the clinical trials for cochlear implants last night (
Home - ClinicalTrials.gov). I recall seeing one where they implant a short length electrode array to preserve higher frequency cochlear hairs for later medically-facilitated evolution, e.g. stem cells. If you're wondering what I'm referring to, it's the Iowa/Nucleus 10/10 mm electrode array in clinical trial NCT00594061.
CIs biggest draw is improved speech perception. Many people say music sounds terrible with CIs, but with only 22 electrodes, youll only hear 22 different pitches maximum. That's enough for understanding speech though. if you want to hear music great, gotta wait for stem cells.
Yes, but like others have indicated, the brain is a powerful tool, and could extrapolate and fill in the gaps between the pitches. How great, I have no idea.
Even with the hearing speech improvement, does it also reflect upon your own speech? For example, if you could not hear "s" with HA's, but can with the CI's, do you start saying the "s"'s more often? I've had years of speech therapy, including focus on the "s, and I cannot say how often I keep on dropping the "s" from the words I say. My old speech therapist always used to tell me, "don't forget your 'S', or you'll be in a mess!" How true that is. It's embarrassing to be talking about hard disks to customers and management when I'm dropping my S's. Especially when they tilt their heads right when I say "hard disks", and they say, "excuse me?". (When dropping the S's, it sounds like I said something else... (replace the first s in disks with a "c" and you'll see what I mean).
) I always try to play it off and say "You know, hard drives? DASD? Stuff that holds your data in files and folders?" At least we don't use floppies (floppy disks) anymore.
You can try the piano thud test for cochlear dead regions. I hear well up to the 900Hz range and above 1200Hz I hear nothing. I can hear down to 30Hz or less since I, you and 90% of people have a sloping audiogram, they hear the low frequencies much better. I don't want to lose the lows with CI.
Makes sense, and it's a legitimate concern. You don't want to lose what you have, and rather assist what you do have. I'll be experimenting with the piano thud test later on to see where the dead zone is for me.
