Children with Cochlear Implants: learning to hear through the brain
Children with Cochlear Implants: learning to hear through the brain
(First-Person Consciousness • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling and Knowing Taá)
Republican Capitalism of Spirits Without Bodies
Decolonial Spirituality Capitalism Neuroscience
The Feeling and Knowing Taá — opening a crack for decolonization
When I watch the sonic world entering through my body, I feel that hearing is not just capturing vibrations — it is reconstructing meaning.
But I also notice that even my words have been colonized: the language I use to think about sound was shaped to reduce my hearing to decibels, my brain to a machine, my spirituality to noise, my culture to distraction.
And so many neuroscientists keep avoiding the questions that could reveal what colonial science is still not brave enough to name.
But when I feel before I know — when Taá rises in the body — I see that Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory) were never truly separate.
What colonizes is not only history: it is the word that prevents the body from existing as a whole.
Every scientific discovery, read with courage, becomes a crack that breaks open Zone 3 and gives back to the body what it has always been: a living territory of possible worlds.
The Taá Feeling of the child who is learning to hear again
I imagine myself inside the body of a child receiving a cochlear implant.
The world first arrives as small electrical clicks — flashes of intensity, fragments of rhythm.
It is not sound as I know it.
It is almost like trying to remember a language I never learned.
Little by little, the skin, the chest and the breathing begin to organize these fragments.
The body tries to “guess” the world before recognizing it.
This is the Taá of reconstructed hearing:
I feel before I know; my body tries to make sense before sound exists as sound.
This is exactly the journey explored in the study published in Scientific Reports (2025):
“Auditory cortical adaptation in children with cochlear implants during naturalistic listening”
(search hint: cochlear implant children cortical adaptation 2025 Scientific Reports)
The scientific question
How does the brain of a child with a cochlear implant learn to interpret natural sounds — music, speech, noise, silence — when the signals reaching the auditory cortex are highly simplified, electrical versions of the world?
The real question is:
How is a sonic world formed when sound is not exactly sound, but a code?
Methods — EEG, temporal processing and neural adaptation
The children were recorded with EEG, focusing on auditory areas:
analysis of power and coherence in auditory bands,
cortical response to the sound envelope (tracking),
neural adaptation during prolonged exposure.
The technical pipeline included:
ICA to remove blinks and muscle artifacts,
FFT to decompose frequency and observe sensitivity to the envelope,
PCA to identify patterns shared by children who adapt more quickly,
CSD to improve localization of cortical sources.
The results focused on how the auditory cortex reconfigures networks to represent sound from partial information.
Results — the brain invents the missing sound
The children:
showed a progressive increase in coherence between the acoustic stimulus and the EEG,
presented better cortical tracking of the sound envelope over time,
displayed signs of slow, sustained plasticity, producing more stable representations of speech.
The most beautiful finding is this:
the brain fills in what is missing.
It completes gaps, reconstructs patterns and creates auditory maps that did not exist before.
Here, hearing is not receiving; it is inventing.
Reading through our concepts
Avatar guiding this reading
When I let my body be guided, I realize that the best avatar to look at this publication is Olmeca, because he sees the world as a reconstructed cultural and sensory landscape.
And that is what this is about: the child does not receive a “universal” sound; they learn to compose sounds from the codes their body can interpret.
Damasian Mind (Mente Damasiana)
Hearing is not born in the ear — it is born in the encounter between interoception and proprioception that constructs meaning.
The implant does not deliver a “real” sound; it delivers raw material that the Damasian Mind transforms into a world.
Human Quorum Sensing (Quorum Sensing Humano)
Learning to hear depends on the other:
the rhythm of speech,
the pauses,
the care taken in dialogue,
social presence.
The child’s body adjusts itself to the body that speaks with them.
Tensional Selves (Eus Tensionais)
The Self that listens must emerge as a Tensional Self of openness — not of defense.
New sound demands physiological courage.
Zone 2
True auditory learning happens when the child enters Zone 2:
curiosity,
enjoyment,
play,
Yãy hã mĩy — Maxakali origin
Learning to hear is learning to imitate the world in order to inhabit it.
The child with an implant lives exactly this: they imitate rhythm and contour until sound becomes being.
DANA
DNA reorganizes circuits, seeks stability, creates new pathways.
The implant is not an intruder: it is an opportunity for DANA to reorganize itself.
Latin American work that resonates with the theme
The song “Gracias a la Vida” — Violeta Parra resonates deeply here.
The voice that thanks the sounds of the world finds, in the child with a cochlear implant, a kind of auditory rebirth.
Each small perception, each electrical fragment that becomes meaning, is a new birth — a new chance to hear life for the first time.
Where science adjusts our view
Colonial science tends to interpret the implant as a “deficit correction.”
But this study shows:
there is no deficit — there is creative reconstruction;
there is no “normality” to be restored — there are possible sonic worlds;
there is no delay — there is another path toward hearing.
The body is not “compensating”; it is inventing.
And that invention is true intelligence.
Normative implications (education, health, LATAM policy)
schools should adopt clear acoustic environments for children with implants;
public policies need to recognize sonic diversity as richness, not deficit;
therapists should include enjoyment, music, singing, play — not only technical training;
Latin American cities can develop social listening programs, valuing different ways of hearing.
Scientific search keywords
“cochlear implant children cortical adaptation auditory EEG ICA FFT PCA envelope tracking Scientific Reports 2025”
When Two Brains Receive the Same World - Cooperation, synchrony, and the shared rhythm of attention
Embodied Singing -Voice, interoception, and Body-Territory in vocal expertise
Pleasant Odors and the Breath that Organizes Us - How smell organizes brain–body coupling
Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments
Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen
Beta Waves and the Moment I Truly Decide - The prefrontal cortex as the space where "feeling" becomes "choosing"
How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife - F0, listening effort, and the vitality of human hearing
Learning Beside Another Brain - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence
Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?
HRfunc and the True Shape of the Hemodynamic Response - Why every brain breathes light in its own way
Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds
Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence
Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness
Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits
Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist
Transformers and Virtual Short-Channels - AI cleaning brain signals and retelling hemodynamics
Mental Fatigue and Performance - When the head gives up before the body
Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit
Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life
Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory
Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step
Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device
Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves
Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world
Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together
Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?
The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment
Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world
Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other
The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas
Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies
NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG
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#Neuroscience
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