Michael Chorost became a cyborg the day his new ear was booted up. Born hard of hearing, he went completely deaf in his thirties. Rather than live in silence, he chose to have a computer surgically embedded in his skull to restore his hearing. This is the story of Chorost's journey--from deafness to hearing, from human to cyborg--and how it transformed him. The melding of silicon and flesh has long been the stuff of science fiction, but as Chorost reveals in this memoir, fantasy is now giving way to reality. He found his new body mystifyingly mechanical: he could plug himself directly into a CD player; his hearing was routinely upgraded with new software. All this forced him to confront complex questions about humans in the machine age: When the senses become programmable, can we trust what they tell us about the world? --From publisher description.