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				Cybersenses Part 1 - Every Sound a Present Cochlear implants help deaf people hear. Alan checks in with a girl named Kelley several years after her surgery to see how artificial hearing works for her.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: Three years ago, we met Kelley Flynn, who lives with her family near Northampton, Massachusetts. Kelley was then seven, and one of her favorite walks, then and now, is through the woods to a nearby river. I]Why? Yeah. Can you hear it? What about when you get your cochlear implant? Yes. ALDA: Kelley had been profoundly deaf since she was two. What little hearing she had, boosted by a conventional hearing aid, was worsening. She had no trouble communicating tby sign, but for years, ppshe'd wanted to talk. MOTHER: Do you like to sign or do you like to talk? To hear better. Why do you want to hear more? ALDA: Tomorrow is the day KePlley has utbeen waiting for for months. You're going to go in... Din the room in one minute. Mommy has to change her clothes, and I will go in with you. MAN: It is just the beginning, but it's an exciting beginning, and in a way, a beginning of her hearing in a whole new way, which is very exciting. And she's the most excited about it. ( laughing ) MOTHER: Good girl, Kel. You're so brave. WOMAN: She's great. ALDA: The surgery that's about to begin on Kelley will permanently implant a tiny set of electrodes deep within her inner ear. WOMAN: We'll take good care of her. Thank you. ALDA: In a normal ear, sound vibrations are translated into nerve impulses by millions of tiny hair cells lining the inner wall of the pea-sized cochlea. Kelley went deaf when an infection destroyed these delicate hairs. A cochlear implant substitutes an array of tiny electrodes-- 22 in Kelley's case-- for the hairs of the hair cells, directly stimulating the cells to send their messages to the brain. Kelley's surgery is being done at Boston's Children's Hospital by Dr. Margaret Kenna. KENNA: What I'm doing now is drilling actually into the cochlea. And the bone of the cochlea is very hard bone-- harder than the rest of the bone in the rest of the body. And as you go towards the center of the cochlea, it gets very white. Can I have the five back? So now we have a hole in the cochlea. Can you see it? ALDA: Oh, yeah, I see it very clearly. ALDA: The electrode array being slipped into Kelley's cochlea is attached to a receiver that is also implanted under the scalp. Both the electrodes and the receiver are connected in turn to an antenna and a magnet. The entire implanted system is visible in an X ray taken while Kelley is still in the operating room. This is the antenna up here. This is the magnet. This is the receiver-stimulator right here, and this is the wires... the electrodes in the cochlea. If you look really closely, you can almost count each individual electrode. ALDA: It'll take about two weeks for Kelley to recover from her surgery. Hi. Are you ready? Yeah. Good. What are we doing today? My cochlear implant-- we'll turn on. We're turning on your cochlear implant. All right! ALDA: A wireless transmitter sticks to the magnet under Kelley's scalp. WOMAN: Can you see it? ALDA: From now on, this is how sounds will get to her brain-- from the microphone behind her ear via a computer that will process the sound into the signals sent to her cochlea. ( high-pitched beep sounding ) Right now, Kelley's microphone isn't on. These beeps are being fed into her cochlea directly. The cochlea normally responds to high-frequency sounds at one end, the low frequencies at the other. ( dull beeps sounding ) The electrodes in the implant mimic this process. ( high-pitched beep sounds ) Kelley has been asked to put a ring on the stick whenever she detects a sound. ( high-pitched beep sounds ) WOMAN: Okay. ( high-pitched beep sounds ) FATHER: She told her friend that when she came back maybe she'd be able to call her on the telephone. She's already exploring it in her mind. She's imagining the things that she might be able to do. And to her, hearing is... is a gift now. It's not like, you know, just being something that you're born with. It's something very special to her. So it's like Christmas. ( chuckles ) Each sound is a present. ( high-pitched beep sounds ) ALDA: So far today, Kelleyhas only heard the beeps generated by Marilyn's computer. But now comes the moment Kelley has been waiting for. ( high-pitched beep sounds ) Her microphone is switched on. Now, sounds from the room are able to enter her head. ( room quiet ) ( gently squeals ) ( father chuckles ) ( quietly exclaims ) ( giggling ) ( chuckles ) ( tapping ) ( laughs ) ( tapping continues ) ( electronic musical tones sounding ) ( rattling ) Like rain. Turn it over. ( rattling ) ( chuckles ) ( rattling ) MOTHER: Do you like the way that it sounds? Yeah. Is it really, really loud? Is it really loud? Or is it perfect? It's perfect. ALDA: Kelley gets her own little computer to turn the sounds picked up by the microphone behind her ear into the signals sent to her cochlea. NEAULT: So, I'll just put it there and let the hair fall down over. ALDA: It's the sophistication of this sound processing-- especially for the sounds of speech-- that has, in the last few years, started to open up the world of hearing to profoundly deaf children. ( no voices ) Hello. Hi. Hi. ALDA: To find out how-- and what lies ahead for Kelley-- we're visiting a classroom for hearing-impaired children, where my job is to read a story. "It isn't fair that my brother Anthony has two dollars "and three quarters and one dime and seven nickels and 18 pennies." ALDA: The room is equipped with a sound system so that the voice of teachers or guests is kept at a constant level. ALDA: Here he is thinking about all the things... ALDA: Some of the children here have conventional hearing aids. ...bus tokens, because you can't buy... ALDA: Several, including six-year-old Timmy, have cochlear implants. Timmy, do you like... you like money? TIMMY: I like lots and lots of money! Lots and lots of money? ( laughter ) Here he is thinking about all the things... ALDA: Those of us without cochlear implants can never know exactly how they sound to children like Timmy, but here's a guess. ( gutturally distorted ): "So they brought lox because my father likes to eat lox, and they brought plants because my mother likes to grow plants." You've been there before, remember? ALDA: Like the%@ children in the cxGlassroom, Kelley now faced many hours of hard work, both to decipher the sounds created by her cochlear implant and, even tougher, learning how to speak herself after years of having few clues as to how her speech should sound. ( water rushing ) Meanwhile, she can finally hear her river. ALDA: Lizzie McGuire-- you watch that. ALDA: Three years after her implant, we met with Kelley again, along with Marilyn Neault, who first turned on her hearing. Do you remember the... the day that we were filming and... and your cochlear implant device got turned on for the first time? Yeah. What was that like? I wasn't camera shy at all. Uh-huh. I felt like a star, what I always wanted to be. ( laughing )i ( both laughing ) What... ( laughs ) What kind of a star do you want to be? What do you... what do you think...? Um, I want to be an actress. fYeah? Has Kelley already become a star from this program? Do people know her... know her face and everything? Well, for the first couple of years, and it's been three years now, you would come and sit in our waiting room, waiting for an appointment with me, and families would come up to you and say, "You're the girl who was on the Alan Alda show. You were on Scientific American Frontiers." And they would tell you and your parents that the show had a big effect on them-- it gave them confidence to get a cochlear implant for their child. ALDA: That's really nice. It happened several times. You know what's great is, better than being a star is being able to be helpful to people like that. I think that's terrific. How young can a child be and... and get a cochlear implant? That's an interesting question. The Food and Drug Administration approves cochlear implantation beginning at age 12 months. What effect does that have on their ability to produce speech, the kind of speech that most of us are used to hearing? We used to be thrilled if a deaf child developed six months' worth of language in a year's time. And now we see them developing a year's worth of language in a year's time, or sometimes more. ALDA: Yeah, yeah. And we see two- and three-year-olds who have had their implant for a year or two who have spoken-language development that's really within the normal range. They don't have to be behind anymore. ALDA: Yeah. It's changed everything. Does... does Kelley speak differently now that she has the cochlear implant? I can remember after the implant picking her up at Clark School, probably six months after the implant, and she had gone on a field trip to Plymouth. And I was always familiar with driving-- I shouldn't say this-- driving with my knee and signing to her in the car... ( laughing ) and then getting that from her, so... This time, it was dark and suddenly we were talking about... talking about the field trip. ALDA: Yeah, yeah. And it was, it was... kind of gives me goose bumps now because it was a conversation in a way that we never could have had before. ( airplane droning ) ALDA: Can you hear that plane? I hear a lot of planes during softball. o'And when my coach is talking... when... when he's telling us what you do, I keep hearing planes go by-- like yesterday. Yeah? Yeah, and... and all I could see... ( no voice ) Z%( others laughing ) Yeah... yeah, I could... like... there's a bee in their mouth. Yeah, yeah... ( laughing ) ( laughing ): That's good. ( laughing )

				Cybersenses Part 2 - Second Sight Doctors are working to develop artificial retinas for patients who are blind due to retinal damage. Alan meets one man who has an experimental retinal implant.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: So, you... you go every place... ALDA: We're in Los Angeles, where Terry Byland, who's been blind for the last 11 years, is about to see again. It won't be much-- at best a few fuzzy blobs-- but he and a team here at the University of Southern California Medical Center are hoping that he's taking the first steps toward a device that could do in the future for the blind what the cochlear implant can do today for the deaf. Oh, yeah, you can throw a football? Oh, I can tell where he's at and how far to throw it by gauging the amount... ALDA: Terry has retinitis pigmentosa, one of the main causes of blindness, affecting one in 4,000 people. RP is an inherited degenerative disease, and it robbed Terry not only of his sight 11 years ago, but also, at the time, of his spirit. TERRY: That first couple of months was like hell for me. I didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't do anything, I was so negative. And then I found out about the Braille Institute in Anaheim, and going there, they taught me how to be the best blind person I could be. So that's what I had to settle for. But now I realize, because of all these wonderful people, I don't have to settle for that anymore. ALDA: Six months ago, Terry was on the operating table for an eight-hour procedure performed by the USC Medical Center's Mark Humayun, who implanted into Terry's right eye a tiny array of 16 electrodes less than a quarter-inch square. Today he's back for a routine check to make sure the electrodes are still sitting snugly against the retina, which in Terry's eye has the characteristically sooty appearance of retinitis pigmentosa. The electrode array is connected by a thin wire that runs just under the skin of his temple to a magnetic connector over his ear very similar to the one used by Kelley and other cochlear implant patients. A tiny video camera transmits images to a computer, which processes the images and transmits them wirelessly through the magnetic connector and on to the electrode array. There the electrodes send the image in the form of electrical impulses directly to the optical nerve. In effect, the 16 electrodes in the array function as a very crude, simplified substitute for the millions of light-sensitive retinal cells that in Terry's eye are damaged beyond repair. ALDA: When each one of these electrodes is activated, he's going to see either a dark spot or a light spot there? Well, that's the very interesting and intriguing thing. Turns out that when you activate one of these electrodes-- and it's very low current-- initially, most patients see a black spot. But as you turn up the current, that turns into a white spot. So the idea is to use each one of these much like a dot-matrix printer or the lights on a scoreboard, to light them up to enable Terry to be able to recognize shapes. ALDA: Okay, I'm really anxious to see what he sees. ALDA: The video camera that will act as Terry's eye is in the bridge of his glasses. Okay, and I'll give you the connector here. Okay. DOCTOR: Just to show that it's very easy for the patient to do this. ALDA: Today's test is to see if Terry can locate a light square projected on the wall. Because the video camera is in his glasses, to move his field of vision, he has to scan with his head. TERRY: That would be upper left. DOCTOR: Okay, good. And what we do is, we also time it. TECHNICIAN: Ready, Terry? TERRY: Yeah. ( computer chimes ) TECHNICIAN: Okay. TERRY: That would be lower left. DOCTOR: Okay, that's good, that's very good. Lower left. Terry, you're getting very good at this. ALDA: What are you actually perceiving, Terry? Well, it's a white light, and it's actually fuzzy looking, and it kind of flickers. A white, flickering, fuzzy light, and it's about this big around. Mm-hmm. After being blind for 11 years, it's so wonderful to be able to see any of this stuff. I mean, for some people that have never lost sight, it's like it may not be a big deal, but for us, it's... it's just... amazing. ALDA: Terry did well locating the squares. But now he has to scan carefully so that the electrode array on his retina will reveal if the bar is vertical or horizontal. TERRY: That's a vertical. DOCTOR: Correct. That's good. ALDA: Seven seconds. I don't mean to rush you. ( all laughing ) I get competitive about this. They're always telling me to slow down, you know? Yeah, no, no... ( computer chimes ) ALDA: So far, Terry has only used the device in this room, scanning images like these for a few hours at a time-- and it's still hard for him to figure them out. Uh, that would be vertical again. ALDA: The computer screen allows us to see how the electrodes are being activated as Terry scans the shapes. ALDA: I think I know what it is now. Do you know what it is? To me it looks like vertical again. To me, too, yeah. DOCTOR: Okay, both of you are correct. ALDA: Am I seeing it more clearly, do you think, than Terry is seeing it? I mean, I'm seeing distinct dots, you know. DOCTOR: So that's an important feature, because there's going to be some current spread from the electrodes. So the perceptions are going to blend a little bit. So you're seeing it much... you're probably seeing it clearer than what Terry sees. ALDA: I see. ALDA: Not only do the nice clean dots we can see appear much fuzzier to Terry, but the part of his brain receiving those fuzzy images hasn't been getting input from his eyes for 11 years now. TERRY: That'd be horizontal. See, I... I got you rushing. DOCTOR: What you see is that there may be some reorganization, some learning that needs to be done in an area that hasn't seen for a while. You bring up a really good point. Because even though this is more distinct than what Terry is seeing, I'm able to interpret these dots more easily than probably Terry can without practice. If your arm has been in a sling or you haven't used it in a while, then somebody asks you to write, you know, initially, that writing is very difficult. Have you seen any objects in this setting or have you only looked at these rectangles of light so far? Uh, we've all... it's all been in this room in here, mostly of the light variety-- we haven't gone outside yet. Because I'm wondering, if you see, for the first time, someone you know, your wife or your child, even though they're just a blob, I wonder what effect that will have on you. ( sighs ) It'll be wonderful, I'll tell you. It'll be really wonderful. It's been a long time. ALDA: These goggles will give me a sense of the 16-pixel world that Terry might see once he leaves the testing room, although my pixels are much sharper than the fuzzy blobs Terry reports seeing. ...Spin around a little bit. See where... Am I getting you crazy? ( laughter ) Let's see... Okay, pretty dark. Yeah, there's the camera, kind of dark, but I'm just seeing squares of light and dark. DOCTOR: Can you... can you... Hold on one second. Can you tell... which way my hand moves? Left and right. Mm-hmm, that's right. I mean, that... that is a tremendous improvement for somebody who is completely blind... Yeah, yeah. to be able to tell motion. ALDA: The next generation of the artificial retina will have 64 pixels rather than 16. DOCTOR: Well, this is the generation we're talking about launching in the middle of 2005. ALDA: Okay... sort of a head and shoulders... shape. Now, somebody just came in. That's right. Yeah. Can you see any movement over here, Alan? Yes, yes, I see, uh... on my... on my upper left. ALDA: But the 64-pixel array is only the next step toward what Mark Humayun hopes will be a system that goes far beyond being able to provide glimpses of shapes and movement. HUMAYUN: This is going to be, we think, the significant jump. ALDA: And how many pixels will this be? This is going to be 32 x 32, or about 1,024. ALDA: Wow. Okay. ALDA: Oh... oh, my God. HUMAYUN: You see the difference? ALDA: Terry, Terry, this is going to... you're just going to... you're going to be amazed at this. Here's what I see: I see... clearly, head and shoulders. I see the painting behind you. I see three squares that are your nose, the shadow of your nose. I see two squares that are your eyes. I see your cheeks. I actually see a face. TERRY: Oh, my God. ( sighs deeply ) ALDA: Let me see you smile. Can I see you smile? Yeah, I can't quite pick up the smile. A little bit, a little bit. Yeah, I think I can. Oh, God, Terry, you're going to love this. ALDA: One of the hopes for a 1,000-electrode artificial retina is that it will allow people to read-- at least large print. ALDA: "...Retina Institute." ALDA: But remember, I'm using only a simulation of a thousand-pixel array, and as we've seen from Terry's testing, it's much harder for him to make sense of the fuzzy blobs he sees than the perfect little squares projected into my eyes. But for Terry and the thousands like him with incurable retinal blindness, there is now hope for the first time. With practice, you're going to be able now in the next few months with just 16 pixels to be able to... sense things and see things that you haven't been able to see before. When you get this, this is amazing. TERRY: Oh, it is. It's just going to get better and better. That's why it's so exciting to be part of it even on a daily basis, you know? ALDA: At the end of our visit to the USC Medical Center, we persuaded the researchers to let Terry try the system outside for the first time. In the coming months, the plan is to let him take it home and use it daily with the hope that he'll gradually piece together a very primitive picture of the world around him. ALDA: From there to there, do you see any difference in light? TERRY: Right there it's shade. Up there is light. ALDA: Right. Let me point... ALDA: In the 11 years since Terry lost his sight, like many blind people, he's learned to sense his environment from other cues, especially sound, like that of the water behind us. ( water splashing softly ) ALDA: You're accustomed to listening for the sounds and knowing how close you are. Absolutely. And now you're adding to that... light and dark. Yeah. So I'm wondering if... That's real light right there. That's my forehead. ( laughter ) That's my forehead! Well, it's very bright, I'll tell you. ( all laughing ) That's great! Very bright! Very bright. Oh, God, this is just beautiful, I tell you. Oh, man.