On March 7, a 10-month-old baby boy was introduced at the NYU Cochlear Implant Center as the youngest patient yet to receive two implants of the so-called bionic ears. That day, the devices were ‘turned on,' and Lawrence Goldfeld heard some kind of noise for the first time in his life.

My audiologist was the first one to tell me about this,” said Yelena Goldfeld, Lawrence’s mother, “and she said we had to try the hearing aids first.”

Since the implants take away any possibility of ‘natural hearing,’ various tests must be done in order to ensure that a baby cannot listen. “[At New York University] they ran 5 or 7 tests in order to sure he can’t hear at all,” Yelena said.

The exams started when he was 6 months old and now, at 11 months, he has a hearing age of 1 month. “I call his name and he turns his head,” said Yelena. “It just makes me cry.”

The implants have been around since the early 1980s, and current technology has made them more and more accurate and inexpensive. The surgery and hardware, which cost between $40,000 and $60,000, and are even covered by most medical insurance companies. Lawrence's surgery and treatment is being covered by Medicaid.

Last Tuesday, Lawrence was back at NYU for a tuning of his hearing software. “I think he doesn’t like it,” said Yelena. “But I know they have to try many different settings. He is a baby, he can’t say how well he hears.”

And though nobody can predict his verbal development, Lawrence’s mother says she hears him say different things now. “It’s not just aaaaaaa. He says bababa and mamama.”

“My son is completely deaf, yet talks on the phone to his grandmother without difficulty,” said David Creemer, whose son has had implants since his first birthday. “His speech quality is indistinguishable from his hearing peers. He attends our neighborhood elementary school, in a regular old first-grade class and is generally at the top of his class academically.”

The implants have proven to be a success in helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people lead lives of full interaction with the hearing world. One adult example of this is Shehzaad Zaman, a student at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine.

"One of the reasons why I chose the University of New England for my medical studies was because the school had a full time disability coordinator that is in charge of accomodations and the school did not show any resistance to the services that I was requesting for medical school," he said.

Among other services, Zaman gets real-time captioning, a word-for-word transcription of the lecture in real time, where a steneographer would listen to the lecture and type into her machine with a text of the lecture showing up on her laptop computer.

For his practice, Zaman also relies on special technology. Cardionics, a stethoscope manufacturer, produces a set of stethoscopes for hearing-impaired clinicians, which has an adapter in the regular stethoscope that can be plugged directly into the cochlear implant system.

The future doctor trusts this special effort will pay off. "I do believe that physicians with a disability tend to be better clinicians in general," he says. "Many of them go into medicine because they have benefited greatly from the hard work and dedication of others while caring for their disability and want to be able to give back to the community."

These are some of the reasons why advances in technology are changing the landscape of the deaf culture. In years past, they completely rejected the idea of cochlear implants.

The deaf culture's main concern, though, is still the same: Shifting the perception of deafness as a pathology, or illness, to a view of it as a cultural difference.

But technology is definitely changing things. "Three culturally deaf families are choosing implants for themselves and their children," said Debra Nussbaum, who has been counseling parents about hearing aids and cochlear implants at Gallaudet University for more than 30 years.

"Up until this year we didn’t have any deaf families considering the cochlear implant. That has been a big change for us," she said.