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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.
"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.
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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
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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.
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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 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.
"Wired is running an article exploring several studies of giving the human brain 'new input devices.'
Get ready for plug-and-pray, mark 2..
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.
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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.
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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 .
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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."
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?")
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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".
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You already can see electric fields. Provided they oscillate at 400 to 750 THz.
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Stand up and close your eyes. What's stopping you from falling over? Touch your nose. Wow! You must have ESP or something!
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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."
I believe they even mention this study in TFA!
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.
It's very strange you mention this. I have the same ability, which most people I tell about it claim is 'in my head'.
The strangest part, in a botched medical procedure when I was 3 years old, I fully lost my sense of smell (Called 'anosmia'.)
Yet to this day, about 12-18 hrs before I notice the first symptoms of a cold or flu, I too can smell this strange odor and know to associate it with having caught a cold.
Unfortunatly due to not having a sense of smell, I've never been able to compare the cold catching smell with any other odor, but both due to the fact my smell receptors are physically damaged, and no one else i've mentioned this to knows what i'm talking about (plus you are the first person i've ever heard describe also having it), I tend to think either most people don't have this sense, or if they do it's percieved on such a low level that it's not realized it's even a sense or 'smell' and gets processed in another way by the brain.