IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 38

LEADING EDGE

Graeme Clark

raeme Clark is the
inventor of the cochlear implant. He was
the dinner Keynote
Speaker at the 2016
Conference on Norbert Wiener in
the 21st Century, Melbourne, Australia, held July 13-15, 2016.
Professor Iven Mareels and distin-
guished guests.
Tonight we celebrate the great
scientific contributions of Norbert
Wiener who was a pioneering re -
searcher in stochastic and noise
processes, and is considered the
founder of cybernetics. He defined
cybernetics as the scientific study of
control and communication systems in
both the animal and machine (derived
by Wiener in 1948 from the Greek -
κυβερνητης to steer or to govern). The
study of cybernetics is important for
engineering, system control, com-
puter science, biology, neuroscience,
philosophy, and the organization
of society. As with many geniuses,
Wiener was also very absent-mind-
ed. It was said that he returned home
once to find his house empty. He
inquired of a neighborhood girl the
reason, and she said that the fam-
ily had moved elsewhere that day.
He thanked her for the information
and she replied. "That's why I stayed
behind, Daddy!"
In 1967 when I set out to see if
we could steer electrical stimulation
of the auditory nerve past a malfunc-
tioning inner ear and restore speech

G

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2697071
Date of publication: 8 June 2017

38

Creating the
Bionic Ear
The Central Role of Cybernetics
netics. In doing so I came to learn
that neurophysiology and electron-
ics were both necessary for a suc-
cessful outcome.
The importance of this relation-
ship can be appreciated when
we consider there are approxi-
mately 1 trillion excitable cells
in the body such as in the brain,
nerves, and muscles. Each excit-
able cell has a voltage of 70 mV
and so is 1/20th that of a AAA bat-
tery. We are thus made of more
than 20 billion batteries. Further-
more, the late Prof. Donald MacKay
from Keel University in the U.K. said
the brain can best be described, not
as a computer, but a vast commu-
nity of linked microcomputers. In
addition, it has been thought that
conscious experiences through the
senses are nothing but the pattern
of electrical activity in the brain. But
my studies on patients suggest that
consciousness goes deeper than
this, and is in fact due to changes in
the proteins within the brain cells. I
believe we are embodied intercon-
nected proteins and not just walk-
ing electrical circuits.

Figure 1. Graeme Clark with iconic
shell study showing a blade of grass
simulating an electrode bundle passing
into the inner ear spiral far enough to
carry out multi-channel stimulation of
the speech frequencies on a place coding
basis. The tip of the electrode needed
to be flexible and the base stiffer. This
was backed up later by finite element
modeling biomechanical studies.

understanding for profoundly deaf
people, I did not realize at the time
this was entering the field of Cyber-
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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JUNE 2017
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