Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World

Owen (Where the Water Goes), a New Yorker staff writer, wrestles with the complexities of the human ear in this informative extended essay on aural perception. Owen, who suffers from tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears, describes in detail his experience and also touches on other conditions, such as benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, a balance problem that occurs when the wrong hair cells in the ear are stimulated, and otosclerosis, which occurs when bones in the middle ear fuse. As part of his research, he is fitted for a pair of hearing aids and visits Starkey Hearing Technologies in Eden Prairie, Minn., to witness the device in production. Owen also acquaints himself with advances such as cochlear implants, which directly stimulate fibers in the auditory nerves and thus create new stimuli for the brain to process as sound. Readers may object that topics such as the stigma of deafness and the deaf community don’t receive much attention. Otherwise, in exploring a bodily mechanism “so remarkably small and complex and hard to observe that scientists still don’t completely understand how all of its components work,” Owen delivers an illuminating account of human hearing. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Oct.)