Integrating technology with personal narrative in science writing
I got into science writing in an unusual way. I was trained as an academic, completing my Ph.D. in educational technology in 2000. In 2001 I abruptly lost my hearing and got a cochlear implant.
When my audiologist first showed me an implant without its ceramic casing I thought, “Oh my God, it really is a computer.” It was a microchip implanted in my skull with 16 electrodes triggering my auditory nerve.
The cochlear implant sounded completely different from anything I’d ever heard before. Radios were gibberish. Clocks were eerily loud. Toilet flushings were explosions. But I gradually learned how to hear all over again. I wrote my way through the experience, keeping a diary that grew into my first book, Rebuilt.
Rebuilt was, of course, about what it was like to have a cochlear implant, but it also went deeply into the science and engineering of the device. For example, background sounds abruptly went away when I started talking. I discussed how an engineer explained to me the C++ code that made that happen (and since I did C++ coding in grad school, I could follow the code line by line.) Knowing that this weird effect was a deliberate artifact of the code helped me get used to it.
In my second book, World Wide Mind, I upped the ante from ear implants, which are about sensation and communication, to brain implants, which are about cognition and control. I traveled the country meeting engineers developing implanted chips that let paralyzed people communicate. I read about the idea of threading thousands of tiny wires into the brain via the bloodstream. I looked in on scientists developing a whole new generation of probes that let them observe and control brain activity in unprecedented detail. (This became a Wired story, which I then developed in more detail as Chapter 8 of the book.)
Obviously I couldn’t write about such technologies from personal experience. But clearly they were extraordinarily intimate interfaces. That was why people reacted so strongly to the very idea of them; they breached the brain itself, that seat of personhood, identity, and experience. Memories, perceptions, and emotions become physical processes, observable and alterable. Consciousness becomes, at least in principle, no longer a private thing.
I didn’t claim that such technologies were around the corner for anyone except drastically injured people. But they made it possible to talk about observing consciously experienced events in one brain and using that information to create equivalent conscious experiences in another brain. They could, in principle, enable ways of knowing what another human being is seeing, feeling, and thinking in a kind of “telempathy.” In short, these new kinds of intimate interfaces raised the possibility of new kinds of intimate relationships.
But what kind of relationships? To explore what they might be, and what they might be like, I wrote about new kinds of relationships I was having. I wrote about brief but intense encounters I had with people at touch-oriented workshops, which on the surface might appear to be about sensuality but were really about connection, understanding, and compassion.
I told these stories to show that new kinds of physical proximity enable new kinds of relationships – and brain-based interfaces would be very much a new form of physical proximity. I wrote, “Such a linkage would upend the primordial assumption that I am Self, you are Other; that I am In Here, and you are Out There. The challenge to one’s identity would be terrifying but also thrilling, risky but also empowering. Any kind of contact, any penetration, confers new powers and new vulnerabilities. A computer disconnected from the Internet is safe from viruses, but it is also nearly useless. A person not in a relationship is safe from viruses, but is also alone. To obtain the benefits one also has to endure the risks.”
That’s how I’ve aimed to continue my exploration of a kind of science writing in which the technological and the personal are seamlessly bound together. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t use telescopes or microscopes or optogenetic probes to discover new insights about the nature of reality. But my partly electronic body is a sort of instrument that has helped me develop a unique perspective and a fresh way of thinking.