Laura Lowes was born with hearing loss. Her mother had contracted rubella while pregnant. At age 2, Lowes got a hearing aid. But at 27, she experienced sudden and dramatic hearing loss, losing all hearing in her right ear practically overnight.
A year later, she received a cochlear implant.
“On activation, it was very, very strange,” says Lowes, a London native, now 29. “Everyone sounded really high pitched and tinny … even my husband sounded like a little girl giggling. But I got used to it quickly.”
In some ways, Lowes was lucky: Her loss of hearing, while profound, had not been with her especially long. She could still remember being able to hear, so it came back somewhat quickly. But it was the aid of audiobooks that allowed Lowes to accelerate her recovery.
At the encouragement of her speech therapist, Lowes began listening to audiobooks six weeks after receiving her implants. She started, she says, with books that she had already read several times. “I bought books from Audible that were familiar to me so that I knew the story and didn’t have to concentrate too much and could follow along easily,” she says, describing a preference for “girly books”: the works of and , for example, and, of course, .
Experts suggest that audiobooks can serve as training wheels for cochlear implant recipients.
“In the beginning, I was following along with the text,” she says. “But I pushed myself so that further along the line I would get rid of the book and just listen to it.”
It turns out that Lowes was doing exactly the right thing. Experts suggest that audiobooks can serve as training wheels for cochlear implant recipients: Patients can in front of them and monitor their own lapses — and improvements — in hearing.
“For cochlear implant recipients, listening to audiobooks provides a great way to help them adjust to their new way of hearing,” says Stu Sayers, a former executive at Audible who is now president of services at Cochlear Australia. “Choosing content that is familiar can also provide context and clues that help the listener identify and hear the words being spoken.”
Combining text with audio “is very helpful because [patients] can see where they made a mistake or didn’t understand something,” says Susan Waltzman, a professor of otolaryngology at the NYU School of Medicine and co-director of its affiliated Cochlear Implant Center. “It can get very frustrating, and the one thing you don’t want to have happen is that they get frustrated and fail.”
“We just finished a study that showed that [implant recipients] can continue to get better up to three, four, five years …”
First developed by American medical researcher Dr. William F. House in the 1960s, cochlear implant technology wasn’t approved in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration to treat hearing loss in adults until 1984. The implant works by converting acoustic sound into electrical pulses, bypassing the damaged part of the ear and stimulating the auditory nerve. It wouldn’t be until 2000, 16 years later, that the FDA would approve a type of cochlear implant for children as young as 12 months. By the end of 2012, more than 300,000 registered cochlear devices had been implanted in patients around the world.
