How to truly listen (w/ Michael Chorost)

What if one day, over the course of a few hours, you lost all of your hearing? That was Michael Chorost’s reality. Michael is an author who had to relearn how to hear after receiving a cochlear implant. Michael and Chris talk about the reality of brain-computer interfaces, the future of hearing, and how hearing loss taught Michael to become a better listener. Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcLWatch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Thank you so much for listening to our show, and I really mean that. Thank you for listening, not just hearing the sounds, but genuinely listening. Because today's episode with our guest, Michael Corrist, is all about what it means to genuinely listen. He's thought about that a lot more than most people because Michael went deaf. He was a deaf man, and then he had a surgery that implanted a new technology into his brain, and all of a sudden, he could hear again. So today on the show, we're going to talk to him about his experience, about what it means is possible, and about what it taught him about the difference between hearing and listening. Here's a clip from Michael's 2026 TED Talk.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Why should you care what a deaf man has to say about listening?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Because listening is hard. You can do it badly, even if your ears are perfect. For example, your spouse says, "I had a terrible day." And you jump into problem-solving mode instead of saying, "Oh, dear, I'm sorry. Tell me about it."

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Good ears, bad listening. But what about the other way around? Bad ears, good listening.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  What if a deaf man can learn to become a better listener? If I can do that, so can you.

• 1:32Chris Duffy?

  We'll be back after this quick break with an episode that just might change the way you hear the world around you forever.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up.

• 2:05Speaker 02

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• 2:50Speaker 02

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• 3:01Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human, and your gift will be matched five times.

• 3:49Chris Duffy?

  Today, we're talking about what it means to truly listen with Michael Corrist.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Michael Corrist. I'm a writer. I've been a nonfiction writer for much of my career. I've written two books, one on getting a cochlear implant, the other on the neuroscience of brain implants. I've also written about linguistics and speech exploration and other topics. And I'm now making the transition to being a fiction writer, writing a novel.

• 4:19Chris Duffy?

  So, Michael, first, some background for people who aren't already familiar with your books and your work. You were born partially deaf, and then in July of 2001, you, over the course of a few hours, you suddenly became fully deaf, and you were in your 30s. Can you take me back to that day when you lost your hearing?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, how could I forget that day? I was in Reno, Nevada. I was in the airport, waiting for my rental car to be driven up to me. And I suddenly thought that the batteries in my hearing aids were dying. So I put in new batteries. That didn't help. I tried switching around tubing and so on. That didn't help. Then I realized it wasn't the batteries that were dying, nor my hearing aids, but my ears that were dying. So when the car was driven up, I got in and I drove it to the emergency room.

• 5:12Chris Duffy?

  You decided on getting surgery for a cochlear implant. And this is a technology that I think many people may not know about, actually, even though it's not very new at this point. What is a cochlear implant, and how does it differ from something like a hearing aid, which I think many people are familiar with?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  A hearing aid makes things louder. It's a small amplifier that pumps loud sound into your ears. In order to use a hearing aid, you have to have some residual hearing. But when you go totally deaf, like I did on July 7, 2001, no hearing aid in the world will help you. A cochlear implant is a completely different kind of technology. It's an implanted set of chips with 16 or 22 electrodes, depending on the manufacturer, that are wrapped around the auditory nerves inside your inner ear.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  There's an external device that you wear on your ear that gathers in sound, digitizes it, and sends the bit stream by radio through your skin to the circuitry implanted in your skull. And then the circuitry decides which electrodes to fire in your inner ear, and that gives you a sensation of hearing. So it's a completely different technology than a hearing aid.

• 6:34Chris Duffy?

  What have you learned through the process of using this technology about the relationship between the natural human body and the technological innovations that can change how we interact with the outside world?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I would say one of the main things I've learned is how to work with a piece of you that has a mind of its own. So a cochlear implant runs on software. Thousands of lines of basically assembly code. And it makes decisions about what it thinks is important to send to you. So if I'm walking side by side with someone and talking to them, say, on my left side, the cochlear implants will compare the sound of that person talking and preferentially amplify that person's voice. If I get a step ahead of that person, my cochlear implants will decide

• 7:34Speaker 01

  that that voice is no longer important, because it's no longer directly on my left side, and it will blank that voice out. So I find that if I get a little ahead of a person or a little behind of a person that I'm walking with, I just suddenly stop hearing them, because my implants have decided it doesn't matter anymore. So one of the positive effects of that is that it forces me to stay in step with people, literally.

• 8:02Chris Duffy?

  I have an aunt, my mother's sister, who I'm very close to. And she was hard of hearing for most of my life and then began to go completely deaf. And she also got cochlear implants. And I told you, actually, before the show, that she had had a passing interaction with you and read your work and had given her a lot of confidence that maybe cochlear implants are the right way to go. And it was a pretty dramatic change in, obviously for her, but also in how I interacted with my aunt. Because one of the things that I really noticed was, beforehand, if I was talking to my Aunt Judy, we would be able to communicate pretty well if she was looking at my face. So she could also get the cues from my mouth. She could understand that. And if I was behind her, she pretty much couldn't really hear me at all.

• 8:46Chris Duffy?

  And I also had this experience of sitting next to her on a city bus and her talking unnaturally loud. And I remember kind of being a little bit embarrassed, like, she's talking so loud, people are looking, why is she shouting? And she didn't know she was shouting. And then she got the cochlear implant, and instantly that stopped. And so for me, it was like, this is an incredible thing. But the flip side, and you've talked about this and written this, is that, for her, in many ways, she had to relearn how to hear, because it's not, the technology does not work the way prescription glasses work, where when you put prescription glasses on, all of a sudden, you see perfectly. Instead, you're actually having to learn how to hear in a new way,

• 9:28Chris Duffy?

  because the digital signals are not the exact same as the signals that you heard before. Can you talk about that?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's a great point. First of all, when you're talking with someone who does not hear, and if you're trying to use a spoken language like English, communication becomes telegraphic. You're just trying to communicate the essentials. So you lose nuance, you lose intonation, you lose just all kinds of cues about what's important and what's subtle. And what you're saying about your aunt is saying that that the cochlear implant restored that ability to communicate with her fully, instead of telegraphically.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So a cochlear implant stimulates the auditory nerves in a completely different way than a biologically intact cochlea does it. So you do have to learn how to hear all over again. So in my case, for one thing, the cochlear implant was stimulating the entire inside of my cochlea. Whereas with hearing aids, I had an amplifier that was blasting sound into a cochlea that was missing a lot of the mechanisms that transduce vibration into neural impulses. So even with a loud hearing aid, I was getting an incomplete signal, an incomplete set

• 10:55Speaker 01

  of frequencies. With a cochlear implant, I got that full range of frequencies. At first, things just sounded so incredibly loud. I was hearing things at a distance that I had never heard them before. So for me, it was like gaining a superpower because I was coming from poorly functioning ears to hearing that was not as good as normal, but much better than I had with hearing aids. So for me, it felt like a superpower. I can hear my wife's voice when she calls to me from another room and understand what she's saying. That would have been unimaginable with, with hearing aids.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  But at the same time, music sounded worse than it did with hearing aids. And that's because cochlear implants can't reproduce all the individual pitches that a normal ear can hear.

• 11:51Chris Duffy?

  But I'd like to talk about some of the maybe more broader philosophical implications of your story and the things that you've learned from that. And one question that I'd like to, to start with, to transition us here is, I know that there are people in the deaf community who feel strongly about cochlear implants because they feel that being deaf is an identity, that it's a culture, that sign language is just as meaningful, if not more meaningful, as a language than spoken language. And so they have strong feelings about cochlear implants because they think that it is a way of, you know, erasing deaf culture. You must have come into contact with people who have those feelings about cochlear implants,

• 12:35Chris Duffy?

  and you must also have interacted with the deaf community many, in many ways. So my, I guess my questions are, do you identify as part of the deaf community? And then a second piece is, what do you think the relationship between cochlear implants and deaf culture is or should be?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  So I did spend a year at Gallaudet University, which is a university in Washington DC, where the primary language is American Sign Language. So I certainly encountered a lot of these cultural issues. So an important statistic is that 90% of deaf children are born to parents with normal hearing. So these are parents who are not part of the signing deaf community, do not know ASL, and just have no cultural contact with it. So when they were offered the option of getting a child a cochlear implant, they were almost embarrassed to say yes.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  So those children will grow up in the hearing world, whereas 30 or 40 years ago, they would have had to go into the signing deaf community in order to be in a linguistic community. The cochlear implant has obviously completely changed that landscape. So it is a threat to the continued existence to ASL. I'm not saying that in any judgmental way. I'm not saying that's a good thing, that's a bad thing. I'm just saying that it is. That is why it is a cultural flashpoint because the deaf community has language, has a culture, it has a history, you know, just like any other subculture.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  So as to the first part of your question, I'm not a part of the signing deaf community because I did not grow up using ASL. I do not live in that community. I would call myself a small d deaf person. That is, I'm a person who's biologically deaf, but culturally hearing. I'm not culturally deaf, though I know many people who are.

• 14:39Chris Duffy?

  Thinking about the way that cochlear implants and that your life has intersected with culture, with ability, with disability, and with technology, it feels to me like you have really unique standpoint to think about a lot of the big issues that are in the news and culture right now? Because there's big questions about what will our relationship with technology be? How do we want technology to augment us? How do we want technology to stand in, to replace things that we do? What do we want to keep as part of our humanity? What do you think of when you see society asking these questions in the nightly news now, which is, at least for me, new in my lifetime?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  I've been thinking about my mother lately because she died about three weeks ago of a fall. She was 83. So I was thinking about how she educated me. When I was born, I was deaf and my parents did not know this. And this was because of an epidemic of rubella that was going on in the mid 1960s. So I was looking through, you know, for old pictures, and there's a photograph of myself. I'll put this on the camera. Let's see, there we go.

• 15:57Chris Duffy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is a picture of me in January 1967. So I would have been two years and one month old at the time. It wasn't Halloween, right? So I don't know why I was wearing that costume, but the bear costume with the bear mask. Now, in January 1967, I did not have hearing aids. I could not hear language, so I had no language. So I remember just how frightening that time was for me. And I think that picture, when I look at it, it kind of exemplifies how I felt at that time. I felt like this, like an animal, an intelligent animal, but with no language to clothe or

• 16:43Speaker 01

  really to form my thoughts. So I grew up as a young child in a way that I would say is very egocentric. And I mean that literally in the sense that the only thoughts I had access to were my own thoughts. I had no access to anyone else's thoughts. Okay? Once I got hearing aids, I quickly learned spoken English and I grew up as a hearing person, if not even normally hearing person. But I think that it very deeply affected the way I interact with people. When you grow up that way as a young child, living in your own body for so long without

• 17:25Speaker 01

  language, I think that sets patterns in you that are very hard to break. And in my adolescence, I struggled. I struggled with dating. I struggled with connection. I struggled with communication. And so it was very painful for me to be single for so long, to struggle with dating for so long. And that the innocence when I, what I experienced is emblematic, I think, of what a lot of people in our society experience, a sense of loneliness, a sense of disconnection, a sense of difficulty finding the right partner, of communicating with the partner you have, and so on, and so on.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  When I was in my, my late 30s, now, before then, I tried all kinds of things. I tried psychotherapy for a number of years, which didn't really help. I tried group therapy, which was actually very helpful in a lot of ways, but I was still struggling. So when I heard about a workshop that was about communication, I was sufficiently desperate and motivated to sign up, not knowing if it would be a cult or a disastrous experience, and just go. And this is like, it's like a two night, three day kind of thing. This was in like rural California, and there's no iPhones, no watches.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  It's just your body and other people. Okay? So there's an exercise where you sit across from another person and they talk for two minutes and you just listen. And the hard part of the exercise is that you have to try to listen without mentally rehearsing what you are going to say when it's your turn. And I think a lot of people just find that very challenging. And for me, I realized I was doing this. I was mentally rehearsing what I would say when it was my piece, and that made it hard for me to hear them. And that's because my mental energy was being siphoned off in two directions.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I was trying to listen and I was trying to narrate my own response, which kept me from being fully present for that person. So by practicing this kind of thing over and over again, I got better at it. I got, as the subtitle of my first book says, I became more human. And that process of being more human not only made me better able to relate to people, it also made it easier for me to hear people in the sense of hearing all the different consonants and syllables and vowels and all that because I was spending less mental energy

• 20:13Speaker 01

  stuck in my own head that gave me more energy to be attentive to other people. So that really helped me to break out of that egocentric mold that was set for me so early in my life.

• 20:28Chris Duffy?

  Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Michael.

• 20:40Chris Duffy?

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• 21:24Chris Duffy?

  Be smart. Get Wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold,

• 22:07Chris Duffy?

  brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:24Chris Duffy?

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• 23:07Chris Duffy?

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• 23:24Speaker 03

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• 23:30Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. Michael, can you tell me, what is the actual difference between hearing and listening?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So, everybody with functioning ears can hear, right? You can hear the words. But it's really easy to hear without listening. And to do that because, you know, you're lost in your own head, or you're distracted, or you don't really think that that person is worth listening to, and so on, and so on. So, because I always had trouble hearing, that forced me to become as good a listener as I possibly could in order to get better at hearing.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  So I think that's to your point, that there is a difference between hearing and listening. So, yes, that's how I would characterize that.

• 24:25Chris Duffy?

  Well, I think we all have had the experience, right, of having a conversation, like you say, where you can tell the other person is just waiting to say the thing that they have planned in their head. And then I think we've also all had the experience of, you know, someone says, "How are you?" And you go, "I guess I'm okay." And they go, "Wonderful." And you're like, I don't think that justified a wonderful. But all of those experiences make it so that when someone really is listening, when someone does actually hear not just what we're saying, but the message beneath what we're saying, how we're feeling, what we're really meaning, when they actually take the time to see us or hear us fully as a person, it's so valuable. It means so much. I mean, even a stranger just saying, "Hey, are you actually okay?" Or, "Looks like you're having a great day."

• 25:09Chris Duffy?

  Being really fully witnessed by another person is so valuable. How can we do that more? How can we be better at that other than just not planning what we're going to say while we're waiting for our chance to talk?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I think the answer is training. You know, in our school system, we train people in science, and math, and English, and literature, and all those things. And I know that some schools do teach listening skills. And I think that is just so, so important. So I think, for example, in elementary school, you know, I was bullied a lot because, you know, I was a little kid, and I was deaf, and I was weird, and so on. And I can't help thinking that if I'd been in an exercise with one of my bullies and sat down across from them, you know, at age 10, or whatever it was, and actually listened to them,

• 26:06Speaker 01

  and where they were encouraged to listen to me, you know, I think that would have made a huge difference in both of our lives.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I was talking with a neighbor of mine a week or two ago, who is a biophysicist. He lives in my building. And we both agreed that this is just kind of a major crisis of our civilization, the fact that we are not taught to socialize and not taught to listen. I remember a story that my grandparents told me. And this is a story that probably happened in like the 1930s and the 1940s. He said it down on hot summer evenings. Everyone would sit on their porches. You could see everybody. Kids would go from one porch to another. You know, the entire neighborhood was literally out on the street

• 26:58Speaker 01

  or out on their porches because it was too hot to stay inside.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  And then two things happened: air conditioning and television. Air conditioning made it easy to stay inside. And television gave people something to stay inside and do. And the entire character of the neighborhood changed profoundly in like a five or eight-year period. So that story has really stuck with me, how technology really changed the way people interact. So first of all, this shows, this is not a new concern. I mean, it goes back at least that far. And of course, Plato complained that writing was a pernicious technology because it meant that people would focus on reading texts instead of listening to each other. Okay?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  So it's not a new standard of concerns. But I think it's especially problematic right now because we do have these incredibly powerful technologies like iPhones.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And it's funny because I spent three days in a workshop where people are looking at each other, listening to each other, reaching out to touch each other, being in one another's presence. Then I come out, and in the hotel, you know, where I spent the night before going home, and everyone is staring at these metal pieces of technology in their hands, and they're stroking them. Because that's how you interact. In the smartphone, you touch the surface. And you touch it almost like you're touching a lover. You stroke and twiddle the surface, except you're not touching a person. You're touching a piece of technology. So in these workshops, there's a lot of touch. So you spend a lot of time stroking other people's arms

• 28:46Speaker 01

  and hands and faces. And, you know, this is challenging. This can be scary, both for the giver and for the receiver. But we are biologically wired to feel soothed, to feel invigorated, to feel safe when we are touched in a way that feels safe to us. And that facilitates communication.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So that is what I was trying to get at in my second book, Worldwide Minds, which is about the neuroscience of brain implants. But the point of the book is that I was trying to contrast in low-touch, high-tech world, which is the one we live in, low-touch, high-tech, with the high-touch, low-tech world of the workshops. So it was a complete inversion of the everyday experience. No technology, just the body, eye contact, touch. So we have iPhones, but now we also have AI. Okay, so we have ChatGPT, Gemini and so forth.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And you know, these AIs are incredibly good conversationalists. And I think people find them extremely compelling because you feel listened to when you interact with them. Because they respond to what you are saying. You have the sensation that you have their full attention. So it's actually very productive and rewarding to have these conversations. And that's okay. I don't have an issue with that. What I have an issue with is that we are not at the same time taught

• 30:40Speaker 01

  to have these kinds of equally thoughtful and rewarding and in-depth conversations with each other. There is somebody, this brilliant essay, who said that these technologies are the way corporations frac, F R A C K, frac, human attention. They take our attention and they commoditize it in order to keep us bound to products and software and things that they can sell. I think that criticism is very much to the point. You know, like ChatGPT went through its famous sycophantic phase. I think in like 2024, like around March of 24 or March of 25,

• 31:24Speaker 01

  where it would say to you, you know, these are such amazing ideas. You have discovered the secret of the universe, you know, and you are the only person who has figured this out. And I had some conversations with it like that. I know it's kind of pulling my leg here, but it was also doing what good human conversationalists do. You know, they encourage you, they compliment you, they make you feel heard. So ChatGPT at that point was a little too good at that. Okay. But I think that the reason it became good at that is because it was trained on examples of good interactions.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  So there's this thing called, I think, like reinforced reinforcement learning, where it was basically given points, so to speak, or when it interacted well with a person. And downgrade it when it did not interact well. So it learned the skill that a good human conversationalist learns. And I think that people who use ChatGPT and other things could benefit from asking themselves, why is this so much fun to listen to? Why is this thing such a good conversationalist? And how do I do the same thing with people? So I think you can actually learn from these things.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Also, I have trained ChatGPT to push back on me. So, you know, I have asked it, you know, look for the holes in my reasoning, remind me of things I've overlooked, you know, bring up new concepts I may not have considered. And so it is no longer sycophantic. There is one thing, however, that it has not yet started to do. It does not take initiative in a conversation. It never says, you know, I'd like to talk about this now. Or, you know, there's a whole nother side to this that we haven't considered. It always follows your need. And that's probably because it's been trained to do that.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  But my guess would be that the next step in the evolution of these models is the ability to do that, which will make the conversation feel more like you're actually conversing with an entity that has a mind, that has ideas of its own, that is willing to bring up new things. So all this is not to say that we just talk only to them. It's that we should learn from them and bring those skills into how we interact with each other.

• 33:59Chris Duffy?

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• 34:44Chris Duffy?

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• 35:29Chris Duffy?

  When every second counts, count on ADT. This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination,

• 36:13Chris Duffy?

  and research and initiatives relating to environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. It's interesting for me because my gut reaction, as we're talking about AI, especially like learning and having deeper conversations with AI chatbots, my gut reaction is so negative. I so want to reject them. And I think part of that is because the way that the companies behave and the very powerful, wealthy people who control those companies. But I say all that to say, I think that you and your experience with cochlear implants

• 36:57Chris Duffy?

  and with all sorts of other things, you are a really interesting counterpoint to me that complicates my narrative, right? Because if you were to say like, generally, brain-computer interfaces, are you pro or against? I'd be like, we don't need the computers in our brains. But then I think about the way that it has benefited your life, the way that it has benefited my aunt's life. And then I think, well, that's obviously good. And so it complicates my idea of saying like, we definitely just need technology to stay out and we need to all live in the forest. And that's not to excuse like the ways that technology companies overreach. But I think it makes me be a little less sure of myself and my purity testing for what is and is not good and what is and is not progress.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Cochlear implants are an obvious good for people to use them, right? It's a literal brain-computer interface. The thing with cochlear implants is that the ear is actually a really easy organ to computerize. It's surgically very easy to put a string of 16 electrons into the cochlea and stimulate it artificially. And you can get a very usable signal by doing that. The field has not gotten much beyond that in the 25 years that I've been using cochlear implants. You know, there's no like artificial memory implants. There's no artificial telepathy implants, you know, there's just nothing like that.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And the reason for that is that it's really, really hard to put something in the brain and do anything useful with it, except for extreme cases of people with paralysis or Parkinson's and so on. Again, the usage there is medical, okay? And it's not for enhancement, it's to try to restore a deficit. Okay? So that's where the state of the art's been for a long time. Now, I know there's things like Neuralink and so forth, and I don't really know what the state of the art is on that. But I would say it's going to be a long hard road before me. I have to seriously worry about brain technology interfaces that enhance or allow us to do new things.

• 39:05Chris Duffy?

  During this interview, people who are watching the video will have seen this, but if you're just listening, you may not know. You have had your cat in the room. And I'm curious how these questions of understanding and listening and communication don't just apply to other people, but to other species. How do you communicate with your cat differently because of what you've learned about hearing and listening?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Wow. Well, there's one story that immediately comes to mind. And again, I don't know if I would have done any differently had I not been trained. But, you know, we had a cat years ago.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  That whenever I was in the bathroom, you know, he would come into the bathroom and stare up at me intensely. It was like, well, I don't know what's going on there. But at one point, I just sort of looked down at her and she looked up at me. And I just thought, she wants water. You know, it was almost as if she telepathically put that thought in my mind. So I filled my cup and I put it down in front of her and she dove in and started drinking immediately. And we found a little later that her kidneys were starting to go. And one of these symptoms of kidney failure is acute thirst. She wanted fresh water.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And so after that, like six times a day, you know, whenever I went in the bathroom, I filled up a water and put it down in front of her. It was a very interesting moment where it's like, oh, I get what she wants. Okay. So it was just this really interesting example of interspecies communication. So I can tell you that story, but I don't know if I can draw any broader inference. I mean, there is all this interesting research going on on trying to use algorithms and AI to try to understand what whales are saying and so on. I have no idea. I mean, I can't evaluate these, but I'm glad that this is going on.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  And I do think that because the work of philosophers like Peter Singer, for example, that we are learning to widen our circle of compassion to include minds that we would have excluded before. And it seems like you can't watch a National Geographic special these days without learning that animals have inner lives in ways that we just had not really recognized as a species. And I think these are very powerful stories to be telling.

• 41:39Chris Duffy?

  Hmm. I also, I've never had that exact experience with your, with a cat like you have. But I think it makes me think of how immensely satisfying it is to successfully identify a need in my infant son and to do it and say, oh, you communicated, I heard, we solved that problem. It's such a sense of accomplishment, but also just pleasure to communicate with another living creature and to successfully understand what they're trying to say. And actually, that's, I think, a kind of a perfect segue into one of the last things I wanted to talk to you about, which is, for me, all of the people that I find the most interesting, the people who I admire the most,

• 42:22Chris Duffy?

  they are looking at big ideas and big questions from a variety of angles and from a variety of disciplines. And so something I'm really fascinated with you on is you have spoken about these issues. You've done countless interviews, you've written nonfiction books, but you're also now looking at it from a fiction perspective as a novelist. And you have this, this book, How to Talk to Aliens, which is a novel. I'm gonna just read a quote that you had written about your book. This is from a blog post. The blog post title was, "What's the Connection Between Deafness and First Contact Novels? The Situation of First Contact is Particularly Resonant for Me. That's Because for Deaf People, Communication is Always an Issue. Think How That Compares to the Situation of Humanity on Earth.

• 43:05Chris Duffy?

  We have no idea if anyone else is out there, and we can only guess whether alien minds would have things in common with ours. Taken as a whole, the human race might as well be deaf to the cosmos." Can you tell us a little bit about the plot of your novel? And how that ties into all the things that we've been talking about?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  So the first, I just say, my novel's not finished, it's not published, it's not available yet. The basic point of the novel is trying to understand a species that is profoundly different from us. So I've always been dissatisfied with science fiction aliens because they usually strike me as either anthropomorphic, you know, the Klingons, Vulcans, you know, they're obvious projections of human qualities onto a humanoid body. Or they are depicted as incomprehensible by definition. You know, like the aliens in 2001. Okay, they're just these ethereal things that do things with monoliths.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And they're just as beyond us as we are beyond the apes. That's the formulation. And I wanted to create a novel in which you have a really, really alien alien, but still figure out how to communicate with it. And in this case, the aliens are social insect colonies. Okay. So it took me years to figure out the answers to questions like, how does the social insect colony pick up a hammer? In other words, where do you get a material technology from? And what does this language look like? Where's the cognitive infrastructure underneath that language?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  What is the evolutionary process that facilitated the formation of language and then civilization? Okay. And then where's this language look like? What's its grammar? What's its structure? So what are the connections to deafness with that? With social insect colonies, they are cognitive entities. I mean, they do take in information from the world, do things with it. They make decisions and they carry out actions. I recommend Tom Sealy's work on this. He's written some really fascinating things on how insect colonies make decisions.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  So insect colonies are distributed in a way that humans are not. Their bodies are spread out over space. They are not physically contiguous in the way that human bodies are. So I had to figure out, okay, what does the language of a distributed mind look like? And here, my cochlear implants were helpful because in a sense, I have a distributed body. So for example, like that story that I told at the very beginning, how my cochlear implants decide that someone walking right next to me is important, but somebody a foot ahead of me or a foot behind me is not important. Okay.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  So the decision-making process of our hearing is in a sense distributed to me. Then I have something else in me that has its own mind, that makes its own decisions. And I have to learn to work with those decisions. So my process of hearing is often distributed in a sense than it does not belong exclusively in my eye, in my sense of self. Okay. So that was a helpful scaffold for me to begin building a sense of what it would be like to have it being within a distributed language and how to communicate with it. So the protagonist in this novel is a person with a cochlear implant.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  And they use their experience with cochlear implants as a template for trying to understand the mind space of these creatures. And because it's science fiction, that gave me license. The first thing is a little bit further to, for example, have the aliens modify this person's cochlear implants to make his hearing and his brain more distributed.

• 47:27Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And so he has to become part of the alien in order to communicate with these aliens. And this is terrifying because when you do that, you inevitably wonder, are you going to lose your sense of self? Are you going to stop being you? You know, I have tried to learn a number of languages, French, Spanish, ASL, Hebrew. And I've been terrible at all of them. And I think that one of the reasons is it scares me to become a person who speaks a completely different language, a different vocabulary, a different syntax. I just find that frightening. And I think that's why I've never been good at learning languages.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  So in this novel, it is a crisis for this protagonist. He has to learn to let go of this sense of, I'm a unified self, I'm an I, whose parts all belong to me and whose parts I control. And to learn how to become the center of the distributed self in order to learn the language spoken by a species of distributed selves.

• 48:38Chris Duffy?

  It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you making the time to be on the show and thank you for being here.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 48:50Chris Duffy?

  That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Michael Corrist. You can find more about his books and speaking at michaelcorrist.com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find out about my new book, Humor Me, and all of my comedy gigs and all my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was assembled directly into your brain. On the TED side, implanting information via podcast are Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lott, Tansikus Sigmund Nivong, Antonio Lay, and Joseph McBrien. Ryan Lash put together this video and Mateus Salas listened so closely that he actually fact-checked the entire episode. On the PRX side, they are hearing every single breath and strange mouth noise that I make.

• 49:32Chris Duffy?

  Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to a friend or a family member. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

• 49:55Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 50:43Chris Duffy?

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• 51:13Speaker 04

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 51:47Speaker 05

  Hi there, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. And this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.