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.'"

Comments

I am not so sure I would want

[willie_nelsons_pigta]

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.

Re:I am not so sure I would want

[SatanicPuppy]

It's not so much that...One of the one's I found most interesting in the series was a kind of belt device that vibrated constantly on the side that faced magnetic north...Like having a dozen cellphones strapped to your belt, where whichever one is on the north side of your body vibrates.

A guy wore it for a year, iirc, and his body adapted to the new "sense" to such a degree that he had a little freak out break down when he removed it, and now walks around with a handheld gps all the time, to try and make up for the "sense" of direction he lost. He says he developed a kind of spacial sense, which gave him a firm sense of spacial orientation...he stopped getting lost...and just sort of knew little directional tidbits like "my house is in that direction" etc.

One of the most interesting things about the articles, is the thread that all our senses are capable of processing more data than we give them credit for...Another article talked about a limited visual sense that interfaced through the tongue, and worked almost without any training at all.

It's some cool stuff, and it definitely opens up some possibility for some interesting sensory "prosthesis" to give information that isn't processed by our natural senses.

Re:I am not so sure I would want

[Lumpy]

It's not new in any way. Prof. Steve Mann from the U of Toronto has been a "cyborg" for over 10 years now. His research into wearable computing has gone way past what these guys are talking about. not log ago he removed his gear and had a complete breakdown. Not having hid database and other sensory enhancements he had built in and became reliant on has a big drawback from what he discovered in his research.

Your body adapts fast to new supplimentary input (Nicotene for example) and does not want to give it up after it has gone.

I strongly reading his research papers for anyne interested in this technology and subject.

Re:I am not so sure I would want

[TheCarp]

I found this interesting in a recent show I saw called "Addiction"

They did FMRI scans of people in various situations, some addicts, some not.

What they showed was actual differences in their brain activity in various centers... changes that happened slowly over time. Use the drug over and over, and your brain adapts to that input, it changes in response to it.

Of course this is assumed to be an unequivicolly bad thing, though, I am not sure we really can put a value judgement on it... its one of those "it is what it is" things, we still don't know quite what to make of it... its still very very high level.

Of course, we should expect this with all things. I was born epileptic. I spent the first half of my life (up to this point) on anti-seizure drugs like tegratol. Look at what tegratol does, imagine a brain being exposed to it on a daily basis during its most formative years.... wow.

There has been only very very limited study into the area. I found a few articles in some recent searches on the subject. Some evidence that kids who grow up on these meds have lower incidence of marriage, lower overall achievement, etc. Overall, from my interactions with others, I have come to realise... my brain works differently in ways that actually makes it really hard to relate to alot of people in some ways.

How much of that is genetics? how much of that is upbringing? How much of that is changes made over years by exposure to brain fucntion altering drugs? How much of my formative experiences were colored or directly influenced?

Don't get me wrong... I am not trying to make a value judgement here, or say "hey look, they broke me" just that, more fascination with how the brain works and how changeable it really is. I would love to have such a "space belt". I wonder wat FMRIs of people who wore one for a year or two would differ from others.

This stuff just fascinates me.

-Steve

Related

[UbuntuDupe]

"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.

Re:Related

[MyDixieWrecked]

That reminds me of an article I submitted to slashdot a few years back. A guy had implanted magnets in his fingertips and he could use that to sense other magnets and metallic objects. He said that he was surprised when he was able to detect where the motor was inside an electric can-opener just by putting his fingers close to it.

It seemed like a really interesting concept. Similar to how your sense of direction works by using magnetic north.

This also reminds me of an element of this book I just read (Rant by Chuck Palahniuk). In the future, people have ports that enable them to plug in and experience a recorded neural episode. In the story, you could get a large-breasted girl high on heroin and sit her in a train watching the scenery go by, the whole time playing with herself and output that to a new recording that you could rent and experience yourself without the dangers of actually doing heroin.

It was quite an amazing concept.

See taste

[networkBoy]

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

Re:mmmmm

[Gwala]

Chicken.

Remember the experiment?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Re:Remember the experiment?

[symes]

That would be Steve Mann. AFAIK - he once wired up a radar to assist his bike rides.

Re:Remember the experiment?

[mykdavies]

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/8589845 31.Ns.r.html

"The upside-down glasses that you describe were first investigated by George Stratton in the 1890s. Since the image that the retina of our eye sees is inverted, he wanted to explore the effect of presenting the retina an upright image. He reported several experiments with a lens system that inverted images both vertically and horizontally. He initially wore the glasses over both eyes but found it too stressful, so he decided to wear a special reversing telescope over one eye and keep the other one covered.

"In his first experiment, he wore the reversing telescope for twenty-one hours. However, his world only occasionally looked normal so he ran another experiment where he wore it for eight days in a row. On the fourth day, things seemed to be upright rather than inverted. On the fifth day, he was able to walk around his house fairly normally but he found that if he looked at objects very carefully, they again seemed to be inverted. On the whole, Stratton reported that his environment never really felt normal especially his body parts, although it was difficult to describe exactly how he felt. He also found that after removing the reversing lenses, it took several hours for his vision to return to normal."

The link has references to the source material.

Not very new...

[LBArrettAnderson]

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.

Eek

[goldaryn]

"Wired is running an article exploring several studies of giving the human brain 'new input devices.'

Get ready for plug-and-pray, mark 2..

Interesting topic, badly written.

[alexhs]

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.

The human brain

[vivin]

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 .

Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thing?

[Kadin2048]

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.

It's Called A "Wife"

[rewinn]

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?")

Imagine you had a sense that nobody else had

[hey!]

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".

Re:Sense of Smell and the cold

[dissy]

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.