Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door, let's go

  I had another opportunity to participate in research that should help improve understanding of how people with cochlear implants hear.  Not the mechanics - that's well understood, at least by the manufacturers, but how the brain interacts with the device. This time it wasn't MedEl's research team, though, it was at the University of Minnesota's Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Services.  It was just two and a half hours or so, listening to speech with varying clarity and responding, while a camera recorded the changing dilation of my eyes, which is correlated with how difficult it is to hear and understand - when you focus and try to hear, your eyes dilate. It didn't take all that long, and I don't mind going to the University campus at all.  I was an undergraduate there, all those years ago, and I love the campus, and I like the atmosphere at a university, all the young people having some of the best years of their lives.   And then we had an early

  Well, not really.  I don't sing much, I am almost certain that when I do I'm not in tune, and I don't need to inflict that on other people.  But I do listen, and I sing along in my head. As Bruce Springsteen said, the best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.  In my case, what I'm facing is walking for anything from 60 minutes to 80 minutes a day - I have to do weight-bearing exercise to keep my bone density up.  And since I have no wish whatsoever to spend my old age being carried around in a bucket (OK, this is me we're talking about, it would probably be a 55-gallon drum and a forklift), I do the exercise.  It works, too, I had a bone density scan a couple of weeks ago any the density is better than my last scan. But man, does it help to have music to listen to, so I have an mp3 player that I usually connect to my CI processors via a neckloop - it connects to the mp3 player via Bluetooth and to my processors via telecoil a

  After our success in attending live theater in February, we decided to give a movie a try.  An actual movie in an actual theater.  My husband wanted to see "Oppenheimer" so he asked if I wanted to go.  Sure, I said, but let's go to that theater in Waconia that has captioning.  I know I'll miss things if there's no captioning. So we went online and bought tickets (it's also one of those theaters with recliners rather than tiny little theater seats, which was quite nice, though not nearly as comfortable as the recliner in our sectional at home).   Then we drove an hour.  See, we live outside a small town.  There are two theaters in town, but neither has captions (according to the websites, anyway, and I think if they had it they'd say so).  So we drove to a town that's an hour from home, but is increasingly becoming less of a town and more of an outer-ring suburb of Minneapolis. When we arrived I asked about the captioning, and it appears to be a littl

  Some time ago I posted about hearing - or apparently hearing - sounds that were familiar from before I lost my hearing.  My brain was more of less filling in the blanks, and letting me hear things like the sound of the shower water, or my hairdryer, or the coffee canister plopping down on top of the tea canister: https://hearinglisten.blogspot.com/2021/01/your-brain-on-nothing-at-all.html Ah, there, so it appears that I posted that in 2021.  Two years on, I'm taking another shower (not to worry, there were a few in between as well) and I noticed that it's not happening anymore.  No more rushing water in the shower courtesy of my hardworking brain, no more banging cabinet doors. I know sometimes when things are making noise but it tends to be when there's associated physical bangs, or vibrations like the sonic toothbrush makes, but mostly, my brain has noped out of the business of trying to make me feel normal, just like my ears had already done. It's not surprising, I

Today I had to make two phone calls.   That quite literally stresses me out more than anything else.  In the last few months I've been working on winding up my late father's estate; I was planning to retire but then was laid off so retirement came two months early (this does not affect me financially, we're fine) and then, of course, as I'm not employed anymore and am turning 65 in May, I've had to enroll in Medicare and my husband had to enroll in both Medicare and Social Security. Of all of that, the worst part was having to talk on the phone.  For most of the last twenty years I've been unable to hear people speak on the phone and trying to do so is an exercise in the most extreme frustration I've experienced - except, of course, I've experienced it over and over and over until at this point I have a loathing of talking on the phone that psychologically I cannot get past. At work, I was participating in Teams meetings extremely successfully.  I had co

  We used to do things.  Go to concerts, plays, movies.  Slowly, though, we stopped doing it because I couldn't hear anything.  I last saw a play in 1999 (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Guthrie, excellent production with Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl, at least as far as I could tell, having missed at least half the dialogue), and have, in the period since 1999 seen two movies in theaters - The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers in 2002 (which I didn't need to hear to know what was going on having read the books several times) and then Gravity in 2013, which actually didn't rely on its dialogue either, you could watch the picture and not hear it and follow the story (presuming you'd left your logic and anything you knew about science at the door). But that's it.  For the last 25 years almost all of our entertainment took place at home, where I could turn on the captions. Now I can hear much better, with my CIs, but we've never tried a live performa