Wow – now that’s something to watch when I get home tonight, cheers for posting.
There was a fantastic documentary on a few years ago about an older couple, both deaf, who had the same thing happen to them – it was fascinating, and very insightful, they could recognise the sound of voices, but couldn’t understand what was being said unless they could see the speaker (and thus lipread). In the end, rather sadly, they opted to have them removed – I think, for people who have always been able to hear, the brain learns to filter out unnecessary sound (and vision and smell and touch, etc), but if you’ve never been able to hear, then suddenly can, there’s no filter in place – the sound of everything all the time was literally driving them nuts. IIRC correctly, he could just about cope but she couldn’t, and when she had her implant removed, he had his done in solidarity. Interesting, but sad.