Past Talks or Interviews
Selected Presentations
- At Science Foo Camp (SciFoo), which was held at Google, I did a Lightning Talk about how I designed the “hands” of the sapient insect colonies in HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS. I also did an earlier SciFoo in which I was on a panel with the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz and then-NASA Ames director Pete Worden about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
- At SUNY Buffalo I talked about how ASL’s use of space influenced my design of the language spoken by intelligent social insect colonies in HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS.
- At the Library of Congress I gave a lecture titled How To Put Your Brain on the Internet. It’s a bit dated now, but I had a great time with it.
- At Princeton I gave a lecture titled “Bionic Ears, Bionic Everything Else: The Now and Future of Body Technologies.” I always love talking with aspiring bioengineers about what it’s like to have cochlear implants.
- At Vassar I gave a talk titled “What It’s Like to Go Deaf and Get Your Hearing Back With an Implanted Computer (And What That Means for Theory).” I was on campus for a week as a visiting lecturer and gave several talks, and that was so much fun.
- At the Rochester Institute of Technology I gave the Edmund Lyon Memorial Lecture, which was titled “Cyborg Ear, Cyborg I: Writing a Book, Rewriting a Life.” RIT was fascinating because it hosts the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which integrates deaf and hard of hearing students into the curriculum.
- At the Strelka Institute, a center for the study of architecture and culture in Moscow, I discussed the Russian translation of WORLD WIDE MIND. Strelka was full of bright, young, European-leaning students with big ideas about making the world a better place. Sadly, it is now shut down because of its opposition to the Ukraine war.
- At the SV Life Sciences CEO Connections Summit, a group of CEOs of biotech venture capital companies, I talked about “the informated body”–that is, a body that both consumes and produces digital information. A cochlear implant delivers about a megabit per second of data to the inner ear, and that data can also be potentially stored and analyzed. I discussed what that could imply for monetization and patient privacy. These are complicated, thorny issues.
Selected Radio/TV/Podcasts
- Vox podcast, Unexplainable, in which I talked with Noam Hassenfeld on Making Sense: How Sound Becomes Hearing.
- PBS Newshour did a show on bionic body parts in which I was interviewed beginning at 7 minutes, 43 seconds. I’m partial to this one because my wife was onscreen with me.
- On NPR I talked about Rebuilt, which had just come out. I’m partial to this interview because I had listened to NPR for hours to help my brain retrain itself. It was delightful to thank NPR…on NPR.
Other Videos
- My author video for WORLD WIDE MIND.
- A video by The Exploratorium in which I explain how cochlear implants work.
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