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Hacking Our Five Senses
zdude255 writes "Wired is running an article exploring several studies of giving the human brain 'new input devices.' From seeing with your sense of touch to entirely new senses such as sensing direction intuitively, the human brain seems to be capable of interpreting and using new data on the fly. This offers many applications from pilots being able to sense the plane's orientation to the potential recovery of patients with blindness or ear damage. (which helps balance).'It turns out that the tricky bit isn't the sensing. The world is full of gadgets that detect things humans cannot. The hard part is processing the input. Neuroscientists don't know enough about how the brain interprets data. The science of plugging things directly into the brain -- artificial retinas or cochlear implants -- remains primitive. So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.'"
I am not so sure I would want other parts of my body seeing. A finger in my nose may not be the most pleasant thing to look at.
Sounds cool! Uber-sensory mechanical integration should be cool. Although, what happens when the system fails?
the feelings of having sex while I'm zoned out on the couch eating Cheetos? If so, sign me up!
Reverse car sensors connected to an Ass-Kicking-Driver's-Seat
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"Sense-hacking" seems like a very fun, interesting pursuit. I recently learned that humans can be trained to echolocate. Wiki article. That looks like a historical example of what they're trying to do -- get the hearing inputs tuned so that you can "sense" the location of nearby objects because your brain transforms that echo into location data.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
So what does blue taste like?
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
The human body is an amazing thing. We have been adding all sorts of wierd things to people without undertsanding exactly how these prosthetics are assimilated into their sensory system, they just are.
There was a short blurb in Science News a couple months back about how an electrode array when placed on the tongue gave the participants a sense of sight. The electrode used the tongue to send impulses similar enough to visual signals for volunteers to discern a 3x3 matrix of on/off dots. Pretty cool stuff, though I'd pay dearly for infravision and/or ultrasound augmentation.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
There was an experiment where people wore goggles that made everything upside-down and reversed left-to-right. After about 6 weeks (IIRC) wearing them, suddenly the test subjects woke up one morning and could see everything normally. When the goggles were then removed, they saw everything upside-down and reversed for another 6 weeks. So changing the brains sensory processing is definitely possible.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
With integrated GPS we would always know where we are and where to go. We could use an AI integrated with our accumulated knowledge to be that "voice in our head" with all of the right answers. We could use our own wifi to be an ad hoc network to communicate, plan and execute with unity. We can't stop here, this is B0rg country.
So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.
That's something that's been done for a long time... a radio transfers radio waves into something that we can hear. A clock transfers the current time to something we can see. A compass also shows us direction in a way that we can see. That's what instruments do. This would be better news if it talked about how the scientists are putting it directly into our brains, as opposed to how that's NOT what they're doing; they've been doing this stuff for many thousands of years already.
but enjoy your subjective reality while it lasts... will the poor be able to afford senses? New industires are really competitive.
"Figure out how to change the sensory data you want infrared into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like sight."
And we shall call it night vision....
We can detect aircraft using radar, and converting that information to visual input. I can do exactly the same with the stock market with a device called a computer. I can detect heat using a heat sensitive camera. I can use a metal detector to sense underground metals and convert the information to sound.
I need a modified one ... that is pointing away from my wife.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
YAY for Ghost in the Shell! YAY for anime! You too will soon be able to join our prosthetic body overlords by switching out your real body for a comedic little Jameson type
So when do we get our brain-to-internet linkup and form the noosphere?
But these changes through experience are fairly permanent and coupled with the brains finite computational power this would mean devoting brain resources to specific extra-sensory processing. This, firstly, takes processing power from existing processes and, secondly, means any upgrades would need to be relearnt over time. In other words, by the time you've learnt how to use smelly-vision(tm) version 1, version 2 will be released and you'll have to start the whole learning thing all over again.
this reminds me of Snow Crash... I like =)
"Don't hate the media, become the media." -Jello Biafra
Even smission?
I mean, come on, it's obvious.
"Wired is running an article exploring several studies of giving the human brain 'new input devices.'
Get ready for plug-and-pray, mark 2..
The article does - kind of. Unfortuately, it doesn't go far past vibrating pads and tongue-arrays. (And yes, the world-flipping goggles.) However, those technologies haven't been around too long. AFAIK, people weren't doing those kinds of experiments before the sixties.
I suppose the difference between the stuff the article talks about and your "radio" example is in the personalization - there's a difference between a radio in the room and a radio only you can hear.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
They've already been done. Remember Jordy on Star Trek, the Next Generation?
One of the things mentioned in TFA is König's feelSpace belt, a belt which gives you information about which direction North is. A lecture he gave about it at the Neuro IT summer school in 2005 is actually available here. It's from two years ago, granted, but still reasonably interesting.
I don't see how this is fundamentally different from a 1950's family physician looking a fluoroscope and "seeing" with X-rays. Or, for that matter, an ordinary set of car rear-view and side mirrors, which give us "eyes in the back of our heads." Or a neurophysiologist connecting his electrodes to an amplifier and speaker, as well as watching an oscilloscope trace.
This sort of sensory augmentation is hardly a new idea.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
It seems to be increasingly evident that a cell phone that makes no use of ones' hands nevertheless consumes attention that would otherwise be allocated to driving, and I suspect this is true of every other input modality.
Attentionis a limited resource. You might as well present the information on an ordinary viewing screen that occupies part of the field of view. However you present it, you can't add more information without blocking your "view" of information you'd otherwise be processing.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Recent experiments that have given mice new color-sensing ability seems to imply that if you can just get the input into the brain, the brain will try and incorporate it. Obviously, this works best when the brain is still "plastic", when the organism is young. I wonder if you wired an infrared camera (or similar) to a newborn that by the time they were a couple of years old, they'd be making full use of the additional information.
Unlike the Neuromancer fantasy, you can't just jack in, but if implanted early enough, you could adapt to the additional sensory input.
First, this is not exactly new. For example, I've read years ago about an equipment with a camera and a dot-matrix that could be put on the finger of a blind person, so that person could see in a low-resolution.
:(
What's interesting is that it can also apply to add sense we might not have in the first place.
Now the writer doesn't understand much about senses
There are more than five, and he even cites internal ear. The balance sense is a full sense, while proprioception is a mix of senses : mainly balance sense, touch (wind orientation changing, heat from the sun), vision (even eyes closed you might be able to see a little light from the sun), sources of sound rotating...
Also, other classic senses are also mixes :
Touch is composed from (at least) pression sensing, heat sensing.
Taste is all what composes touch (feeling of the texture of what you eat, heat) plus tongue receptors,
plus flavours receptors, closely related to smell.
Pain is a separated sense, it's a stress from cell that then emit strong signals in nerves and can originate from internal organs.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Would you like the large dump or the small dump? Where do you want to save it?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The human brain is pretty plastic. It can adapt to a lot of new conditions. In patients who are recently blind, or even in people who have been blindfolded for a while, the sense of touch and sound is amplified. Areas of the brain that were used for vision, are now used to interpret sound and touch. PET shows which parts of the brain are active. Check out Phantoms in the Brain and .
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
You just need to sign up for a two year contract. But it will be .45/min if you go over your listening plan, and you don't even want to think about the roaming charges for hearing stuff you shouldn't.
Can you hear me now?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You're joking, but I could see some applications of this in cars.
... two feet ... " or even "beep...beep..beep..beepbeepbeeeep") you could wire it to an output device that uses some of the driver's unused senses.
For example, right now there are a lot of cars with sonar sensors to aid in back-in parking. Rather than turning that into audible output that requires a lot of processing to make sense of ("three feet
Many cars also have inflatable air bladders located in the back of the driver's seat, for lumbar support. Imagine if we connected the parking sensor to the lumbar support, so that as you backed the car in, you'd feel pressure against your back as you got closer and closer to the obstacle. (You'd still want an alarm when you got too close, something that triggered the brain's "abrupt onset" threat response.)
A more complicated system might use multiple bladders, one in the center of the back and smaller ones on either side, to let the driver know approximately how close they are to the car in back, and to the curb, when parallel parking.
Such a system would probably require minimal training and be quick to subliminalize, because it's pretty close to what we experience naturally. (If you're carrying a heavy box and walking backwards, and you feel something contact your back or the back of your legs, even lightly, you're going to immediately stop moving.)
I hope that this research leads to new kinds of output devices that use more of the brain than today's systems, which tend to present everything as predominantly visual, with a smattering of auditory, data.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
I mean, heroin works because it causes certain chemicals inside the brain to change. If you don't release those chemicals, it's not going to feel the same. So a completely honest recording of a heroin trip would necessarily have to produce the same physiological response in your synapses as the real thing.
I suspect, that if such a technology were available, that "recordings" of people doing drugs would quickly become just as illicit as the drugs themselves, because they'd be just as addictive. (Although, it's not as though the drug laws in the U.S. have ever had any real correlation to harm, so it might matter more who was making money by selling said recordings and how many Senators they owned.) There are quite a few novels that I've read where the idea of addictive neuro-stimulus was discussed; off the top of my head I think it comes up in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't know about in the online version, but that's one of the things discussed in the print edition of the Wired article. It's in this month's issue. (Look for the 'removable clothing' naked girl on the cover.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm surprised the Wired article didn't reference the earlier Wired story on the guy who implanted magnets in his fingertips and could "feel" magnetism (see this Slashdot story).
for those of us who spend a lot of time rewiring our houses or playing with high-voltage and high-current devices. Coz boy howdy is it exciting when you clip a line for which you think you've turned off the breaker, and kerblammo. Takes a good-sized chunk out of wireclippers before the correct breaker trips.
/dev/brain but the tagging system doesn't like punctuation, apparently.
I tried tagging the story
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My senses go to eleven.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
more details? did you rtfa?
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Here is a device that allows the blind to "see" by imprinting images onto the tongue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0
Kinda neat. Extremely low-resolution. I probably first found that link on Slashdot, for all I know....
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
There are a lot of possibilities once you get the output devices small enough to be comfortably worn by an average person for extended amounts of time.
Back before Bluetooth headsets became common and it became (borderline) socially acceptable for people to walk around looking like they fell out of a Star Trek episode, I always thought that there would be serious cyborg possibilities if you could come up with a very small, preferably implantable, earphone that a person could wear continuously. With the source apparatus somewhere else on your body, you'd be able to get a constant stream of information presented to you without an observer being any the wiser.
I always thought that an AM crystal radio, operating on some longwave frequency with the human body as the conductor, would be the way to go. All you'd need would be something in the ear to translate the RF into vibration (piezoelectric?), and by using a crystal transceiver you wouldn't need batteries. (Of course...being around lightning or anything else that sparks could get painful.) You'd probably be talking about something the size of a grain of rice without the antenna.
This was all back before I'd ever seen the actual chip that lies at the center of an RFID tag; now, I suspect, you could have some pretty intelligent active electronics inside something the size of a rice grain, and eliminate many of the problems inherent in having your power and signal on the same frequency (as is the case with AM going into a crystal radio).
I think it's entirely possible that in a generation, perhaps less, people will look back on dangling earbud wires (or even earbuds that you have to continually insert and remove) as comically antiquated.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When I got married, my sense of hearing adapted to enhance my sense of color ("You're going to wear that?"), smell ("The garbage needs taking out") and self-preservation ("Does this make me look fat?")
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
:-P
Not just that, I don't think you can "wipe" your brain's "RAM" as easily as you can on a computer.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Would you even know you had it, not being able to describe it to other people?
It turns out there are other senses, other than the five Aristotelean ones. Proprioception, for one: the awareness of body positioning. People who have proprioceptive disorders because of things like brain damage don't really have convenient and commonly understood language to describe their impairment to other people, other than to say they have brain damage that makes them clumsy.
But language or not, at least people share the sense of proprioception, so there are shared experiences that could form the basis for communication. But imagine you had some ability most other people didn't have, say the ability to detect electric current or to feel when somebody was observing you. I'm not sure you would necessarily even be aware when the sense was operating, other than feeling a kind of "intuition".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think that is the perfect example of the programming interface-like potential of our senses. Video games are another great example: where an 'user interface' is designed to transmit data that may not have much to do with the actual physicality of a thing. For that matter, all visual representations use the sense of sight to piggy-back additional data. Where this ought to go, though, is towards creating different paradigms that people can learn to operate their senses in; using their sense of touch, for instance, to get directional information, or to get proximity information (imagine a real-life device that gets hotter or colder the closer or further respectively you get from the target), or any number of other things. Learning different paradigms would be different at first, but we all learn to switch 'modes' in any number of different areas; balance while riding a bike versus while walking, using a Mac or a PC (wait... there are people who use both?), talking in one language or another. With the explosion of data that we are able to gather and process externally, this seems like a necessary step towards bridging the synthesis gap.
[Ego]out
well, the idea in the book was that you plug in and you experience all 5 senses that the person experienced in the same way. There were methods that people used by re-recording the output of someone experiencing another recording, like recording someone eating a cheeseburger, then have someone who hasn't eaten in a week experience that recording and re-output it, thereby making the cheeseburger so much more enjoyable.
The book goes for pages and pages explaining the process. I believe there's an entire chapter or two on it. You should read the book when it comes out (I had a pre-release copy). I must say it's one of the best I've read.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71
While the experiment resulted in the destruction of the implant, I can easily see a future where a more rugged and stable version of these (embedded in the bone perhaps) are available. They'd be a lifesaver for electricians.
This is totally something you just can't understand unless you've experienced it yourself. Taking 3 hits of great acid or a bag of psychedelic mushrooms can make a lot of this happen naturally. I'm not talking about taking these and going out to party for a night. I'm talking about closing your eyes for hours while listening to music or camping in the woods. I closed my eyes and held on to a dog's leash while under the influence and he dragged me to my buddy who was almost a 1/2 mile away. It's no big deal that the dog brought me, it's the fact that while my eyes were closed, I could sense objects through the leash/ movements about what was around me. It was like I was seeing through the dog. Same night while listening to music.. with my eyes closed I was watching the notes dance and could define their color. Psychedelics are very very powerful and can misused easily. But with the correct time and place... it can change your world forever. Timothy Leary was all about rewiring your brain through psycedelics. He knew the potential. The research has been done. http://www.leary.com/
Haven't they heard of LSD?
I'm not sure I'd want to be "hacking" any of my senses this way.
From the summary 'So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.'
Last time I checked humans had made instruments to detect and track information of all sorts. In order to turn the things detected into something that could be detect by human senses we invented an interface. They are called displays and take many forms. We even invented a way to our brain to interface with and control those devices in turn, they are called controls and also take many forms.
I should point out that heroin doesn't merely cause chemicals in your brain to change. Heroin replaces certain chemicals in your brain, stimulating mu-opioid receptors. That causes the number of mu-opioid receptors in the brain to increase, and I believe it also decreases production of natural opioids. Hallucinogenic/psychadelic drugs aren't generally addictive, so that likely wouldn't be a problem with stored trips either.
ResidntGeek
Air Pressure: Barometer (Sight)
Air Pressure: iPod (Sound)
Altitude: Altimiter (Sight)
Magnetic Field: Compass (Sight)
Proximity to solid objects: Radar (Sight, Sound)
Detection of radiation: Geiger Counter (Sight, Sound)
Presense of organic molecules: Nose (Smell)
I have more of this intellectual property. I have received USPTO approval for "The creation of new human senses via translation of non-traditional input to brain-compatable information" ans will begin suing pretty much everyone.
Stand up and close your eyes. What's stopping you from falling over? Touch your nose. Wow! You must have ESP or something!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.'"
Converting electromagnetic fields to sight? We have that already, it's called a TV!
My car doesn't have such a system, so I don't know how helpful they are or aren't.
However, having been once nearly driven over by a garbage truck whose operator didn't bother to use the rear-facing camera that was provided so that he could see what's in back of him, I think there's definitely a market for systems that deliver information in a more subtle manner, if that means that people pay more attention to the information that's provided.
It's not just "bad drivers" that this sort of thing helps. If you had systems like this uniformly installed in all vehicles, it would make it much easier to go from driving one car to another. I don't generally let people unfamiliar with my car parallel-park it, because I don't want them to misjudge the corner and scrub my tires or scrape the wheels against the curb. Likewise, I probably wouldn't hop in a big sedan and try to do anything remotely challenging either, because it's been years since I've driven anything that large. But if you had a standardized system in vehicles to communicate to the driver the vehicle's position relative to any nearby obstacles (in the same way we have de facto standardized controls for steering, acceleration, brake, etc.), going from a VW Golf to an C-350 cargo van wouldn't be so much of a challenge. People would step out of one car and into another without a second thought.
Rather than just looking at new technologies as opportunities for laziness (which they certainly can be), it's more helpful to focus on the new scenarios or activities that they make possible for people of average to moderate skill. An analogy with planes might be someone saying that AInstrument Landing Systems are just for pilots who don't know how to land properly. (I don't know the full story on their introduction but I'll bet you a shiny penny that some old pilots, somewhere, probably said just that.) While that's one way of looking at the technology, another way is to consider the number of places where planes can now land, where they'd otherwise have to be diverted due to poor weather conditions, darkness, etc.
Automotive drivers' aids are the same way. While they will probably be used by some drivers who aren't up to snuff, in order to let them get away with things that they shouldn't, they can also allow good drivers to do things that they just accept as impossible or very difficult today.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
cf. Instrument Landing System
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I believe they even mention this study in TFA!
At the beginning of the article, it is said that the guy with the belt which indicates the north knew 100miles from his home where it was: I find this quite strange: to really know where he was he would need to have *two* directions, not only one..
I wonder if his feeling about where his hometown was, was really so accurate, or if it was just a 'false feeling'.
Ouch.
While that sucks for him, I don't think it totally invalidates the experiment's results though, just perhaps part of the methodology. There are definitely substances that the human body doesn't seem to reject (titanium, some ceramics, some types of stainless steel, some plastics, etc.) and are already used in medical applications. Perhaps if the magnets had been coated in something nonferrous but inert, the rejection wouldn't have happened. (Maybe ceramic capsules?)
I also wonder if you could do something like tattooing, but with a magnetic dye. Guess you'd probably need a lot of it injected in order to feel any forces produced by it through the receptors in your skin, and there you'd definitely have big rejection possibilities, but it might allow you to add magnetic sensation without implanted hard magnets. (Heck, I wonder if you could use some sort of biocompatible ferrofluid, that would dissipate in a certain amount of time, so that you could have magnetic sensation for a while but not permanently bar yourself from going within 15' of an MRI machine.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think hippies have been hacking our five senses for years. No word yet on POSIX compliance.
technical writing / development
I want to gauge my eyes out everytime I stumble across Wired's new design. I'm actually willing to give up that sense because of them.
Here is a video (speech and presentation) about enhancing conventional senses and adding new ones by implanting magnets.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Every measurement device known to man essentially works this way. It measures x and makes it available to the senses.
Metal detector: detects metals and makes sound that you can hear.
Volt meter/oscilloscope: Measures voltage and makes it available to the brain via eyes.
Clock: Measures time and presents it to the eyes or ears...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Can most people detect when they're getting a cold? I always notice, just before the cold symptoms begin, a distinct baseline smell in my nose which does not come from the environment around me--it's always there no matter where I am or what I'm smelling. I also notice a different scent when I experience sunburn, and a different one yet when I have a bacterial infection (major cut, sinuses, etc.)
the real at&t mix
The idea of sensory playback has been around in science fiction for at least several decades. There was also a movie exploring this (cannot remember the name, it starred Christopher Walken and Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) something like 15-20 years ago. In the movie there are various recordings, the obvious one, a sex tape which someone looped into continuous playback, and one of someone dying.
Synesthesia, perceiving one sensory input as another (e.g. sound is seen) has also long been a topic in science fiction, iirc The Stars My Destination had a character named Gully Foyle who experienced this.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Start by looking at LSD. Users of the mind bending substance often experience crossed senses. Seeing music, and also hearing what you see, among other things.
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
Check out this project. It lets the vision impaired "see" using a set of headphones, a pc (laptop rig) and web cam (head mounted). Check out some of the video demos.. I was able to quickly pick out the windows and doors on the buildings the user was walking past.
I am not vision impaired, and I think using this would probably give me a massive headache, but I could get used to it if it was my only option.
I cannot find a good web link, but I clearly recall reading about experiments conducted over 25 years ago (I think I read about it in Science magazine as a teen) where scientists severed the optic nerves of rats, near the location where the two nerve bundles cross just before entering the opposite sides of the brain. They then reconnected the nerves to the wrong eyes. After initially healing from the surgery, the rats were confused for a while, then fairly quickly adapted and within a short period of time (days to weeks) were acting as if nothing were wrong. A similar experiment was conducted on cats by actually inverting one of their eyeballs:4 26/
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http://www.springerlink.com/content/w4t82x8u73401
A scientist named George Stratton, as the parent post (and I now see another post below) mentioned, conducted similar experiments on humans with inverting prism glasses, and had similar results. Here is another link to a description:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w9n3wk699uu5v
And an experiment with lateral offsets to vision, in children (probably related to how eyeglasses affect our brains and our hand-eye coordination):
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920(193303
The brain is remarkable.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I mean, heroin works because it causes certain chemicals inside the brain to change. If you don't release those chemicals, it's not going to feel the same. So a completely honest recording of a heroin trip would necessarily have to produce the same physiological response in your synapses as the real thing.
Why not just record the memories of a someone going through 5 year rehab and then upload them after the experience? Problem solved.
Or better yet, just turn off the ability for your brain to desire for sensory indulgence. It might be a lame way to acheive nirvana like Buddhist monks spend their entire lives attempting to achieve, but I suppose if you simply recorded a Buddhist monk meditating and that put that memory into any human they could simply by pass the psychological effects of having a simulated heroin trip.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
- visual (sight)
- tactile (touch / pressure)
- auditory (sound / vibration)
- smell
- taste
- balance (the inner ear)
- heat
all of which report about things outside one's body. There are also "forgotten" internal (introceptive) senses:- kinesthetic: the ability to know the relative position of limbs and body (no external references)
- proprioception: the internal bodily state - composed of such things as "hungry", "thirsty", "sleepy", muscle fatigue, etc.
- and finally, pain.
Of course, mapping over the first five with additional senses is much easier (and, right now, safer) than doing so on the other two... but hopefully when we start building ourselves cyborg bodies, the "check oil" light will be mapped over the proprioceptive or pain sense.Do you like Japanese imports?
But i wouldn't want to wipe my butt with that hand.
I think I'm going to try making that North-buzzing belt. All it takes is an electronic compass, some vibrators, a belt and some controller logic.
A quick Google search came up with:
Electronic Compass for $5
Vibrators for $1 each.
The belt and the controller can't be that expensive. You could probably do the whole thing for under $30, even accounting for frying a few ICs trying to get it to work. Right?
Am I an ubernerd or does this sound ridiculously cool to anyone else?
Easy, just use an axe. Though a spoon might be better suited to gouge your eyes.
Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.
... Moron, thanks for figuring it out. Nobody ever thought of that one. You are like a God, except that you are a moron. You work for the USPTO don't you?
Like maybe a picture?
This was all in the last issue of Wired, so I guess it's just getting to Slashdot now.
Anyhow, I know that I don't have a very good sense of direction, so I'd certainly pay if I could buy one of those belts. Although it might look kinda strange, heh.
Though I can never remember the specifics or anything, it's been showing that if you place an electrode in the proper place in a rodent brain that can evoke immense pleasure (probably some dopaminergic nuclei in the limbic system) and hook it up to a switch the mouse can activate stimulation himself - that the mouse will figure out that this magic switch is amazing. And as a result, he will eventually just sit at the switch stimulating himself until he starves to death. In humans with chronic pain disorders, they have similar deep brain stimulators that you're supposed to activate when you're in pain - but inevitably some people will just stimulate themselves for fun, though I haven't heard of anything drastic as the mouse experiment. Just some random facts from some of my neuroscience courses
Remember "The Stars My Destination"? Didn't all that tech he had implanted kind of turn on him when the wires started to cross?
Yeah, that would probably work. I think the attraction to implants would be the resolution and sensitivity; you'd be coupling magnets as directly as possible to the pressure-sensing nerves in the fingers, so it's tough to get closer to direct perception than that.
Something that vibrated in the presence of magnetic fields might definitely give you some gross perception of magnetic fields, but it seems like it might be very hard to get very good resolution out of it, since vibration is usually felt by a whole part of your hand. You really need some sort of sensation that's localizable and could be triggered only across a very small area.
IIRC, the types of nerves found in your skin perceive warmth, cold, pressure, and mechanical trauma (pain) including extreme temperature. Since using pain is probably not the key to user-friendliness in human-interface design (could someone send the inventor of "Clippy" a memo?), the problem is finding a way to map magnetic fields into tactile data and conveying that to someone's skin.
If you could figure out a way to create some sort of sensation electrically (does electricity just trigger the pain receptors? it doesn't feel like pain at low voltages/currents), then you'd probably be able to develop something that could be worn as a glove and would let someone "feel" magnetic fields, via Hall effect senors or similar.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That's all well and good, but what about my sense of smission?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well you could've at least warned me. You know I hate the zap... when they die. It just brings down your whole day!
---k--
</stupid>
I don't know how it works, but ever since I was a child I could always tell when a television was turned on near me. I used to think it was because I could hear some sort of sound from the television that other people couldn't hear, but sometimes I can do it in very loud environments so it might be something else.
An example goes like this :
Back in high school one day, I was walking to my english class. We were watching a film in class that day, but the teacher hadn't told anyone. I think it was an last-minute change to the day's lesson plan. I was about 50 feet away from the classroom, and there were people in the hallway talking loudly as it was between periods. Just then, I saw the door to my class open up ahead, and I heard/felt a high pitch noise that I've grown to associate with televisions turned on. Sure enough, when I walked into the class there was a TV there, set to the Video channel (important note : I can't do this when the tv is set to an actual channel. only when it's set to a video input channel with nothing playing).
I've been able to do this almost my entire life. Funny thing is I've always hated TV, and rarely watch any shows.
The brain doesn't interpret the data, it's all userspace. Just hook the stuff into the brain, cd into
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
This recent study is also about hacking or senses. It measured sensory loss to circumcision (announce,abstract,full study pdf).
I doubt I know enough about hardware to make my own, but I'd love one of these things.
Maybe someone should clue ThinkGeek in, or...?
If you manage to make them, sell some, or at least put out plans. I can solder, even if I can't design any electronics like that.
just to see if it works (and for pure torture ;) ) remove the eyes of a small newborn animal, hook up a camera directly to the area of the brain that inturpate's sight and see if that animal can actually see (via the camera). Now that would be an interesting thing if the brain actually could use the signals from the cam and the creature could see and move about freely.
g0t b33r?
I can't taste, so I couldn't tell you.
It's so unfair... I have eight other senses, but I'd trade them all, even smission, to be able to taste.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
If it's the one I know, it's some ... sickly ... smell deep inside your nose, deeper than normal scents seem to occur.
I don't know that it smells like anything else. Smells aren't that easy to compare, only to recognize, and I don't know of anything with a similar smell.
The device in question was called a "tasp". They work in remote control form (like an "anti-taser"), but the addicts have them implanted in their head to provide a constant trickle.
Well, suppose we start doing what they're talking about here - turning non-recognized input signals into recognizable brainwaves and such. So, we're really hacking the brain to work through channels that we know how to manipulate, we just have to have a translator (dare I say modem?) of some sort to go from non-brain signal A to brain-readable signal B. But what if we hack it better so that signal A doesn't have to piggyback on the senses we know about, but instead we learn how to interface with the proper areas of the brain?
Timothy Leary had an idea, that in the future, we'd have a little button on the back of our necks that would induce an immediate, pleasant reaction - it could be as mild as a good cup of coffee or as intense as LSD, depending on how you program it. So, this seems like it suggests the idea of figuring out how to trigger those areas of the brain through some kind of direct interface - what would the law do then? Could an interface to the brain be outlawed? Well, you're right, it depends on where the money is - the law goes where the green grows. Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked.
Sure, a recording sent into the brain would be great, but what about inducing the exact brain-state of a moment? A movie? A song? A drug experience? Not a recording, but more a programming for the brain - the difference being that with programming, as opposed to recording, you can tweak the code yourself to meet your brain's needs, especially since every 'video' would probably have to be tailored to every user, costing far too much for the experience.
Pop in a tape or push a button?
The brain is indeed a remarkable organ. I've taken LSD, and seen sounds and heard colors. I've also known people who had degenerative problems involving their eyes, and when the degeneration stopped, their vision became better after a few months - the brain essentially mapped around the problem, filled in the blanks, just like it does with the blind spot we all have in the center of our vision where our optic nerve hooks up...
Green tastes like people, because Green is made of people !!
-- Rastignac was here.
My sense of smell is fine, but I can taste when I'm about to get a cold.
And no, I cannot describe the taste. It is unlike anything that I would eat willingly.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Never stand directly in front of a breaker or other device to engage or especially to disengage said device.
Never ever cut more than one wire at a time unless the other ends are still in the box/on the reel.
Never use cheap tools or test equipment, never wear anything but 100% cotton unless it is flame retardant.
Never trust anyone but yourself, and be very very critical of that person.
Never think you have to actually touch something before it can hurt, maim or kill you.
Never assume that because something is grounded that it is harmless.
Never get in the current path, voltage is impressive, but it is the current that kills.
Never assume anything is dead or it might be you, hell never assume anything anyway.
Never do anything with thinking it over really really well, and again, and again.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew