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