I Can Hear You Whisper

An investigation into the science of hearing, child language acquisition, neuroplasticity, brain development, and Deaf culture spurred by Lydia Denworth’s discovery that her son couldn’t hear her lullabies and the family’s life-altering decision to give him a cochlear implant. Lydia Denworth’s third son, Alex, was almost two when he was diagnosed with profound and progressive hearing loss. As both a science writer and the mother of young children, Denworth was steeped in messages about the importance of enrichment to the developing brain. She became determined to do whatever it took to allow Alex to hear and acquire spoken language, a quest that ultimately led to a controversial piece of emergent “superhero technology”: the cochlear implant. In this engrossing journey to the frontiers of science, readers will learn why sound is so important to the developing brain, what new possibilities come from the latest research, and what exactly is going on when you focus your hearing at a cocktail party. Denworth goes beyond her personal experience with her son, interviewing the world’s leading experts on child language development and hearing technology, leaders in the deaf community, and neuroscientists. I Can Hear You Whisper weaves together Alex’s story with the tales of two scientific revolutions: the centuries-long quest to develop the cochlear implant and science’s changing understanding of the brain’s remarkable plasticity—all told against the sometimes-incendiary backdrop of identity politics and medical ethics.