By: Michelle Castillo/CBS News/June 20, 2013, 12:17 PM

A 3-year-old boy is hearing the world for the first time, thanks to an auditory brain stem implant.

“He likes sound,” young Grayson’s mom Nicole Clamp, said to CBS affiliate WBTV in Charlotte, N.C. “He enjoys the stimulus, the input. He’s curious, and he definitely enjoys it.”

Grayson Clamp was born without his cochlear nerves, or the auditory nerve that carries the sound signal from the cochlea in the inner ear to the brain. His parents tried giving him a cochlear implant, but it did not work.

They then enrolled Grayson in a research trial at University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, N.C. Three weeks ago, he became the first child in the U.S. to receive an auditory brain stem implant.

The procedure involves placing a microchip on the brain stem to bypass the cochlear nerves altogether. The person perceives and processes sound, which travel through tubes in his ear.

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