Cochlear Implant is a Cyborg-enhanced hearing aid for the Deaf.

I want to share with you all about my view on cochlear implant as like in the science fiction "Star Trek" series and movies. "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” (You will be absorb into other new culture. Ability to resist the new influence is completely ineffective) is a famous quote from the Star Trek Borgs who changed its aliens into their culture and under the control of the Borg Queen. It made me wonder if the deaf culture is now become the new definition of the deaf culture as the deaf cyborg culture since the cochlear implant is now inserting into the human being and enhancing their hearing abilities.

I found the interesting article about the cyborgization in the humans. I just copied from the Wikipedia (Cyborg). Here is the article: There are two important and different types of cyborgs in medicine: these are the restorative and the enhanced. Restorative technologies “restore lost function, organs, and limbs” The key aspect of restorative cyborgization is the repair of broken or missing processes to revert to a healthy or average level of function. There is no enhancement to the original faculties and processes that were lost.

On the contrary, the enhanced cyborg “follows a principle, and it is the principle of optimal performance: maximising output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimising input (the energy expended in the process) ”. Thus, the enhanced cyborg intends to exceed normal processes or even gain new functions that were not originally present. Although prostheses in general supplement lost or damaged body parts with the integration of a mechanical artifice, bionic implants in medicine allow model organs or body parts to mimic the original function more closely.

Michael Chorost wrote a memoir of his experience with cochlear implants, or bionic ear, titled "Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human” (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) is a scientific memoir of going deaf and getting my hearing back with a cochlear implant, that is, a computer embedded in my skull. Science fiction writers and filmmakers have speculated about cyborgs (human-computer fusions) for decades, but in his book, he reveal what it’s really like to have part of one’s body controlled by a computer.

Jesse Sullivan became one of the first people to operate a fully robotic
limb through a nerve-muscle graft, enabling him a complex range of motions beyond that of previous prosthetics.By 2004, a fully functioning artificial heart was developed. The continued technological development of bionic and nanotechnologies begins to raise the question of enhancement, and of the future possibilities for cyborgs which surpass the original functionality of the biological model.

The above source is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg

You may check my video in ASL at my YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoahuhQFgD4