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It was the late 1980s, and Boston College undergraduate John Brigande was exhausted. It wasn’t because he had been partying too much or because he had pulled too many all-nighters. He was wearing himself out simply trying to hear. “A hearing-impaired person burns an enormous amount of energy working to understand the meaning behind sounds in their environment, especially voices,” says Brigande, who started losing his hearing by age nine. “At the end of the day, I was totally spent doing the work to hear.”
By the time he started graduate research, also at Boston College, the budding developmental biologist had lost much of his hearing in his left ear, but he was able to get by thanks to the amplified sounds emitted by a ...
