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Defective in your ener ear. but the nerve that goes from your inner ear for the your brain the brain stem, that's working. so you don't need to replace that. in a very small percentage of people, including grayson, they don't have the nerve at all. it's a much more difficult problem in some ways to tackle. but the way they tackled was to essentially create a part of his nervous system. it's an unbelievably remarkable thing. >> watching the whole video. he seemed confused or thrown by it. i can't imagine to live that many years of your life without hearing any sound and then all of a sudden hea...

Cochlar implant? >> it is. the nerve from your inner ear to your brain, your brain stem that's working so you don't need to replace that. in a very small percentage of people including grayson, they don't have the nerve at all so it's a much more difficult problem in someways to tackle but the way they tackle it was to essentially create a part of his nervous system. it's just an unbelievably remarkable thing. >> watching the video he seems confused or thrown by it. i can't imagine what it's like to live that many years of your life without hearing sound and all of a sudden, hearing sound. do ...

And the inner ear is connected to our brain. so if we lose hearing normally, we put a hearing aid on or something called a cochlear implant which we put in the inner ear. this child has nothing connected from the ear to brain. jenna: wow. >> so the hearing aid won't work or cochlear implant won't work. what they did is they put an implant directly on his brain stem which is one of the first steations in the brain. -- stations in the brain. jenna: how effective is it? >> well, we don't know. in adults it was primarily performed in people who had no hearing nerves, and they often had brain tumor...

Let me show you the way this works. again, it is remarkable. we're working at a true medical first here. as you pointed out, anderson, the nerve that goes from his ear to his brain stem, that's what he doesn't have. that's a specific hearing loss. they're trying to do is recreate part of his nervous system. let me show you on the brain model. this is the right side of the brain. this, you see the microphone that's sort of sitting around his ear. that takes sound, sort of processes it, distills it to various frequency, anderson, literally, there is a wire that goes straight to his brain stem th...

Nerve that goes from the inner ear to the brain, it didn't develop. so we have to figure out a way to bypass that, rick. so in this case they put the implant right on the brain, right on the brain stem. and the biggest problem when you do that is that you can't understand speech very well. you can understand environmental noises, but you can't understand speech. so they've developed a speech processer that the child will wear on his skin, and it will literally interpret sounds and frequencies and beam them right to the brain with a wireless device. this is modern technology. rick: unbelievable...