Wired For Sound: A Journey Into Hearing

Blindfolding your eyes, plugging your ears, and taping your mouth shut, these are all ways we simulate being blind, deaf or mute. We do this to try and get a feel for what its like to have one of these “handicaps.” We will never really know what it feels like to live day in and day out in a world of silence. This is a world where the voice of the person standing in front of you isn’t heard, nor is the sound on the movie screen or the birds chirping in the early morning. This is unimaginable to most of us, but to millions around the world, this is normal, everyday life, and they’ve learned to overcome it. In Wired for Sound, Beverly Biderman leads us through her lifelong experience with being deaf, receiving a cochlear implant, and the effects of that on her life. She allows us to share her personal struggles and shows us at length how she dealt and is dealing with them. She offers many statistics to help educate us as well. She shows us something that is not come across very often, insight into both the hearing and deaf worlds from a personal point of view, one who has experienced both.

We are introduced to Beverly Biderman on her “turn on” day, which is six weeks aft

Although Beverly is a successful woman, in that she has a good job, and a husband and son, she still decided to get a cochlear implant after “surviving” decades without it. She did not arrive to this decision easily. She, like many others, did plenty of research and talked to many others that had been or are in her position. The three main factors that help indicate how good a patient will be able to use an implant are: duration of profound deafness, age at implantation, and motivation. Although the first two were against Beverly, over thirty years of deafness and age forty-six for implantation age, the third was in her favor; she had a high motivation to hear (P3). Her son was somewhat opposed to the surgery and she was aware of the fact it may not improve her hearing, but she went ahead anyway because she felt she had nothing to lose. She had support from her family, including her sister Leah, who had assisted her, and her deaf father, much of her life in her everyday needs.

After getting the cochlear implant, and having it turned on, Beverly realized just how much work and patience it is going to take to hear again, and that all the expectations she had built up were slowly crumbling to the ground. She had subconsciously believed that she would be a miracle case in which she hears perfectly the second the device is turned on, however, like with most other things, this is not the case. There is no instant miracle here, but instead a gradual miracle of hearing that appears overtime. Biderman discusses with us aspects of both the hearing and deaf worlds. We come to realize the people from these two different worlds view the cochlear implants in different lights. Although there are many in the deaf community that are accepting of the implant, there are many that are against it. Beverly shows that to us when, in the first couple pages, she admits to her fear of telling people of her implant. She is scared to because she thinks they will not agree with her. The deaf have almost formed their own community, and some are against “leaving” it by gaining a cochlear implant. On the other hand, hearing people can’t imagine why a deaf person wouldn't want to get a cochlear implant.

Beverly’s deafness did not stem from a sickness or illness that she had gotten as a child; it was instead hereditary. Many of the relatives on her fathers’ side were deaf and there was a fifty-fifty chance that her hearing mother and deaf father would have a deaf child. Of their three children, Beverly was the youngest and the only deaf one. Never learning sign as a

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