Michael Chorost

Michael Chorost (KOR-ist) was born with severe hearing losses, got hearing aids at 3½, and transitioned to cochlear implants after going completely deaf at 36. Cochlear implants gave him access to sound, but the neural input was so strange that he struggled to understand what people were saying. In his first book, Rebuilt, he recounted his gradual realization that he had to stop treating communication as a puzzle to be solved (e.g. “decode the phonemes”) and view it instead as a form of compassionate, indeed moral, attention that could still work despite people sounding bizarre. The book received critical acclaim, winning the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. He continued exploring the topic of communication in his second book, World Wide Mind, and has published articles on, among other things, the role of metaphor in consciousness and the world’s most ambitious attempt to send a radio message to extraterrestrials. He’s currently writing a novel about a team of scientists learning a language spoken by alien social insect colonies—the ultimate challenge in communication. He loves giving talks, but in conversation he prefers to ask questions and listen. A Brown and UT-Austin grad, he now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and their two cats. If you’re at TED you should talk to his wife, by the way. She’s here. Victoria Nugent. She works at Democracy Forward. Ask her about her work defending federal employees and the scientific research they do.

Reading physics books. I did my work in the humanities, but I love reading about black holes, AdS/CFT correspondences, and quantum weirdness.

The inventors of cochlear implants really should get the Nobel Prize. They were an audacious and courageous bunch. How could curing total deafness *not* get the Nobel?

Doing Tarot card readings. It’s not that the cards have any predictive power. Rather, a good reading is a co-construction of meaning out of a random, but potent, set of images/symbols/concepts.