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.'"

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[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".