So here's one for the offseason. What are some of the most amazing or groundbreaking or even flabbergasting things that you've seen in the world that have come about due to feats of science?
I'll kick it off. My father in law has terrible hearing. As in "not that far from deaf" hearing. When tested for sentence accuracy (HINT test; being able to hear and recite words in a sentence purely auditory so you can't read lips amongst background noise) he scored 19%, which is terrible.
About two months ago, he had surgery to install a
cochlear implant. The device bypasses all your natural hearing physiology, and directly electrically stimulates your auditory nerve based on the output of a processor translating sound into signal.
After a few weeks to heal up, they turned it on in early April. Sunday was the first day we saw him since then. He said when he first got it turned on, it was almost like bleeps and bloops; he described it as "sounding" like R2D2. But through the therapy associated with it, it's been consistently getting better since then as his brain has started to associate the new electrical signals from the processor into something that he can identify as speech. He's even started to pick up and identify other sounds he hasn't heard in years, such as birds chirping, etc. It's not entirely easy, because his brain has to re-learn the association between electrical impulses that aren't identical to how his physiological hearing generated stimulus to his auditory nerve, but it's been slowly coming back. He even said that while music (which he's always LOVED) is still not quite there, he had a Pink Floyd song come on the radio and suddenly it coalesced into sounding like what it's supposed to.
A few days before Sunday, he had gotten his retest on the HINT. He scored 89%, which is in the "normal to mild impairment" category. Which is absolutely fantastic. And it's likely to continue to improve over time.
To me, that's an astounding thing. Humanity created an electronic processor that bypasses all normal hearing and directly stimulates the auditory nerve, and now my FIL who was near deaf can hear almost normally.
Who else has something amazing?
