Hacking Our Five Senses and Building New Ones

ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."'"

Comments

Chose a sense

[moniker127]

I chose emf detection. That would be handy.

Re:Chose a sense

[bcmm]

There was someone a couple of years back who implanted tiny magnets in his fingers. He said he could feel vibration from alternating fields.

Re:Chose a sense

[Kagura]

I can already sense many EM waves, from deep infrared to bright purple.

Re:Chose a sense

[The_mad_linguist]

Several people have done this (google pulls up feelingwaves.blogspot.com/ ). Apparently super gluing to your fingers also works, albeit less effectively.

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I can already sense many EM waves, from deep infrared to bright purple.

Purple... really? I don't think you have it quite right.

Re:Chose a sense

[EdZ]

Quite a few people have done it since. Current experimentation is with finding a method of encapsulating the magnets that will not breakdown inside the body. Silicon dipping leaves thin spots at the corners of the magnet, and no company will use PVD coating on small sample quantities of magnets

Re:Chose a sense

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The advantage of gluing is that you don't have to dig the disintegrated fragments of magnet out of your fingertip when they eventually start to corrode.

Re:Chose a sense

[drinkypoo]

That would be pretty cool if you could do it with nonferrous electromagnets. Implanting magnets or indeed anything magnetically attracted in your skin is fucking stupid. They could be powered by glucose (too lazy to link) and be wrapped right around a nerve fiber or something so they could be truly minuscule and yet still detectable.

Re:Chose a sense

[sexconker]

Perhaps he means octarine.

Re:Chose a sense

[lessthan]

Linky Be careful, some of the site is definitely NSFW.

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I can do much better... all the way until violet!

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading that article. It sounded totally awesome.

Re:Chose a sense

[Phasma Felis]

That would be pretty cool if you could do it with nonferrous electromagnets. Implanting magnets or indeed anything magnetically attracted in your skin is fucking stupid.

Yeah, you'd better hope you never need an MRI for anything.

I think they should make 'em modular, myself. Just flip up your fingernail to access the space. If you're not using them for magnets, you could transport secret messages, say, or extra Tabasco for your lunch. Don't see any way for that to go wrong!

Re:Chose a sense

[vlm]

The glove method is even safer, more quickly reversible, and arguably cheaper, since you don't need glue and probably already own gloves.

Can either use little magnets stuffed in the pointer fingertip of the gloves, or big ole hard drive magnets kind of held in the palm. Or both, I suppose, but be careful they don't stick together.

I've tried this and it works quite well until your hands sweat too much from the gloves being too warm inside the house. Old fashioned linear power supplies are much more entertaining than modern switchers. It's pretty strange knowing by touch if a material is ferromagnetic, because it's "sticky". I was not able to move my hands fast enough / use strong enough magnets to experience magnetic braking when waved over conductive surfaces, although I suppose it should be possible with stronger magnets. Tiny bits of magnetic junk built up on the gloves as I pawed everything... Best not touch CDs/DVDs when covered with magnetically attached iron shrapnel. In summary, it was a fun, cheap, and respectible way to entertain myself for about an hour.

Re:Chose a sense

[need4mospd]

Maybe another color that ends in urple?

Such as "Light Urple" perhaps?

Re:Chose a sense

[jeffb (2.718)]

I can sense shorter wavelengths than that. Only at pretty high intensity, though, and there's a latency period of a few hours before the sensation really picks up, and then it takes several unpleasant days to extinguish. And then there's the peeling.

Re:Chose a sense

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you want to feel magnetic braking, you should have everything you need in the guts of any computer manufactured in the last 5 or 10 years. The bottom of a CPU heatsink is generally a nice thick slug of aluminum or copper. Highly conductive but nonferrous. Pop it off, wipe the thermal grease away, and move a hard drive magnet, or small stack thereof, just over the surface. It is a really weird feeling.

Re:Chose a sense

[LiENUS]

Tell me about it. I just finished sensing it, i'm at the peeling stage now.

Re:Chose a sense

[Kreigaffe]

Tabasco under your fingernail.

Yes, capital idea! I don't see any way that could turn disastrously painful either!

Re:Chose a sense

[AdamThor]

There used to be a device you could plug into your phone, and it would light up LEDs according to vocal stress levels. Presuming the device yields info that you can't yourself already hear, I think that would be pretty interesting.

Any social information you could remotely gather about people you were interacting with could significantly alter your day-to-day life.

http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20050820/voice-stress-analyzer-used-as-a-truth-detector-2/

Re:Chose a sense

[beckerist]

I thought we had 11 senses...
Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!

Example: what direction is "down?"

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

"Chose a sense"

I will chose spelling.

Re:Chose a sense

[LBt1st]

This always drove me insane as well. Although that page lists even more then I had even thought about before.

Re:Chose a sense

[Tubal-Cain]

Example: what direction is "down?"

Towards the enemy's gate.

Re:Chose a sense

[Fnordulicious]

Voice stress analysis is pseudoscientific and the devices are all hoaxes.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1390

Please do not perpetuate the scams.

Re:Chose a sense

[Nazlfrag]

It depends on whether I'm heading down to the shops or down to the beach.

Re:Chose a sense

[cerberusss]

Actually, some people think they have Electromagnetic hypersensitivity and they suffer from it, with complaints of headaches, constant tiredness, etc. Of course, when using a blind test the sufferers could not distinguish between an active and non-existing EM field.

Still, they suffer.

Re:Chose a sense

[Firefalcon]

I used to get a slight headache and involuntarily shudder whenever we drove under high voltage power lines as a kid. It doesn't seem to happen now I'm grown up, but I still seem to have some sensitivity to magnetic fields - I worked for a company that sold "magnetic health products" and had to insist that I really didn't want any of their stuff near me because it would give me a headache... Of course, some of that could be psychological, I've not experimented to see if I could tell the difference.

Also, with older mobile (cell) phones I used to be able to tell when they were broadcasting (most likely polling the base station as it wasn't making/receiving a call) by a kind of slightly painful sensation in my hand if I was holding it. I only get that now with modern mobiles if my hands are wet.

Re:Chose a sense

[uglyduckling]

It's just an oft-repeated myth. It can be easily proven: put your hands on your knees, close your eyes then touch your nose with one or both index fingers. Now explain which of the "five senses" (touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing) allowed you to do that with accuracy. Touch allowed you to know that you'd done it, but it was proprioception and to a lesser extent vestibular sense that allowed you to do it.

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Current experimentation is with finding a method of encapsulating the magnets that will not breakdown inside the body.

Dentists have been using implanted magnets for decades. Encapsulated in stainless steel, available directly from FDA-compliant manufacturers, excellent longevity. Cost more than dipping your Magnets-R-Us in silicone, but I'm not sure it makes sense to cut costs on a device you're planning to implant permanently in your body.

Re:Chose a sense

[dargaud]

I thought we had 11 senses... Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!

Same for the continents. I've been to all 7 but people still think (and teach) that there are 5... There must be something safe to that number 5 that people are afraid to get lost afterwards.

Re:Chose a sense

[Mark_in_Brazil]

GP:

I can already sense many EM waves, from deep infrared to bright purple.

Parent:

I can sense shorter wavelengths than that.

There's an experiment you can do to show you can sense longer wavelengths than infrared too, but it would void the warranty on your microwave oven.

Re:Chose a sense

[EdZ]

Are these sub-millimetre N40+ NiB magnets, or just magnetised steel?

Re:Chose a sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I chose emf detection. That would be handy.

That's unbelievable!

Re:Chose a sense

[fifedrum]

+1 win the internets for you

Re:Chose a sense

[Tubal-Cain]

I've been to all 7 but people still think (and teach) that there are 5.

I consider there to be 6 continents (Eurasia), but I don't dismiss arguments for counting only 4: Americas, Afro-Eurasia, Australia, Antarctica.

Re:Chose a sense

[jackchance]

I thought we had 11 senses... Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!

As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.

So how many senses do we have?

You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch,smell, and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).

We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.

The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".

There are valid historical reasons why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank of human experience?

and yes, IAAN (i am a neuroscientist).

Re:Chose a sense

[Tablizer]

I can already sense many EM waves, from deep infrared to bright purple.

Wow, a slashdotter left the basement :-)
     

Re:Chose a sense

[Tablizer]

There was someone a couple of years back who implanted tiny magnets in his fingers. He said he could feel vibration from alternating fields.

The guy I feared most in the floppy-disk era.
     

Slashporn

[Anonymous Coward]

such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads.

Sounds like a good BDSM porno. The electrodes go well with the ball and chain and magic wand.

Re:Slashporn

[koutbo6]

Instead of rushing to get a FP anonymously and making my day, I bet the guy next to me that we will get a porn related comment within the next 10 minutes.
Needless to say, I won my bet from the 2nd post!

Re:Slashporn

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Sounds like a good BDSM porno. The electrodes go well with the ball and chain and magic wand.

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one to notice this BDSM trend today on Slashdot.

I was beginning to think that I should cut back on my DMT consumption.

Next we might see a post about advertising these electrode ball and chain magic wand services on Craigslist.

Re:Slashporn

[Dark_Gravity]

Sounds like a good BDSM porno. The electrodes go well with the ball and chain and magic wand.

Expect to hear from Microsoft's patent lawyers concerning the "magic wand".

That's easy

[SoundGuyNoise]

Smission. I wouldn't want to use taste to compensate for vision. Have you licked a Buick lately? Not as sweet as they were in the 50s.

Re:That's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

God oh God, why did I burn my mod points already.

Thank you - that really made me laugh :-)

Re:That's easy

[vlm]

Have you licked a Buick lately? Not as sweet as they were in the 50s.

Uh, thats the anti-freeze. The old glycol was terribly toxic and terribly sweet tasting. I am told the new dexcool stuff does not taste sweet.

Re:That's easy

[cthulu_mt]

It gives a whole new meaning to "Taste the Rainbow".

Re:That's easy

[corbettw]

That would bring a whole new level of intimacy to oral sex.

Re:That's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

shut up soundguynoise. quit the false praises.

electrodes

[snarkh]

It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight.

They used to do it in Guantanamo.

Re:electrodes

[Archangel Michael]

Not sure how the electrodes got into your mouth. I seem recall that the electrodes were hooked to genitalia.

Re:electrodes

[snarkh]

Depends on which senses are being compensated for.

Re:electrodes

[FredFredrickson]

Not sure how the electrodes got into your mouth. I seem recall that the electrodes were hooked to genitalia.

Oh, I think you figured it out.

Re:electrodes

[Anonymous Coward]

It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight.

I read a story in the last couple years where a plastic set of electrodes was placed on the tongue of SCUBA divers and allowed the divers to sense their surroundings with their tongues.

so its not just for 'teh lulz'

Re:electrodes

[corbettw]

No no no, they were using electrodes to enhance people's memory, not their eyesight.

Re:electrodes

[ResidntGeek]

I read a story in the last couple minutes which mentioned that. Do you know what story it was? IT WAS THE STORY YOU'RE COMMENTING ON.

Am I the only one...

[Drinking Bleach]

that was immediately reminded of Geordi's visor?

Re:Am I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope so.

DMT

[F34nor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine is responsible for the 6th sense, imaginary friends, self replicating machine elves, and telepathy... bitches.

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[ciderVisor]

I hope you didn't drop it on the carpet - it can leave nasty burnholes.

Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Deep into the experiment, WÃchter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place.""""

Now you know how birds feel.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Red Flayer]

"Deep into the experiment, WÃchter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place.""""

Now you know how birds feel.

It's not just how birds feel. People who spend the majority of their time outdoors, with the ability to see the sun, get the same feeling. Citydwellers have the unfortunate circumstance of generally not being able to judge direction by the location of the sun; people in rural areas don't have this problem.

I grew up in a rural area, but close to the ever-encroaching burbs. I spent most of my time outside (I know, anathema to most slashdotters)... and to this day I subconsciously know what way is north, no matter where I am... as long as I've gotten glimpse of the sun in the morning or night at some time from that location. This is why I never get lost outside (though dealing with indirect roads can make it umm, interesting getting to where I want to go.

If I had some kind of input for direction when inside, I'm pretty sure I'd have a good bump of direction inside as well... but since I don't, I find extensive underground systems annoying (like Grand Central Station in Manhattan).

IOW, the guy who wore the vibrating belt added a different sensory input. Humans already have the capacity for "mapmaking", it's not limited to birds. Ask any orienteer. We just have little reason to exercise it in today's world.

Re:Zen for birds.

[relguj9]

We just have little reason to exercise it in today's world.

Exactly, my iPhone kicks your belt's ass.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

of course, if you live in a city were the streets are built in a NEWS grid, then you gain this too if you are observant enough.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Thinboy00]

No, the belt is much better; the iPhone is confined to a poor medium for expressing directionality compared to the belt.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, people in a city are too stupid to know which way is north. It's those rural folks who are responsible for advancing humanity. Seriously.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Red Flayer]

Exactly, my iPhone kicks your belt's ass.

Well, I don't need the belt.

So you're dependent on an external accessory, that costs you cash to purchase and operate, for your navigational needs. What happens if you run out of battery power? What happens if the external provider of one of the necessary services stops providing that service?

You have a device to help you do something it's possible to do for yourself, with less effort than using your device. And since you're so out of practice with using your own ability for this, you're completely dependent on it.

Good for you. You can take pride in being crippled by dependence on your devices.

I hope you were being sarcastic. If not, I pity you.

Re:Zen for birds.

[I'm_Original]

I grew up in the country, far from anything resembling a city, and I can attest to this. I used to walk off in the morning and get to somewhere I'd never been, wandering around for 6 hours at a time . . . didn't get lost though. I would just walk along, building a map in my head, and it was easy to get to any place I had ever been no matter where I was.

Living in the city now, I get really annoyed sometimes. I still have the habit of just cutting a straight line to get to where I'm going, but in the city there is always the inevitable fence, highway, building or angry person. Somewhat paradoxically, in the city following my sense of direction forces me to backtrack more often than not.

This was not, however the case when I went on an exchange year in France. The newer parts of the cities there are more like the cities in north america, and I would have the problem described above. But the older parts were often more organically laid out with shortcuts and passageways that you could find if you just went in the 'obvious' direction. Much nicer for walking around and living in.

Re:Zen for birds.

[relguj9]

Errm.. I don't use the iPhone as a compass, I use it instantly determine my current location and/or how to get from my current location to any destination with no knowledge of my destination other than the name. And I don't have to fuck with my brain to accomplish it.

The belt has an advantage if I'm on foot in the woods or something, or if I'm off the grid. But that doesn't really apply to the thing in question, which is "today's world" which is where I'm at 99.99% of the time. In "today's world", an iPhone kicks the belt's ass.

I think the belt is more of a proof of concept than anything and the applications of the concept could be incredible. I mean, we've already been doing this sort of thing with night vision goggles and the like, but it just takes it to a new level. Using senses other than sight to perceive stuff.

It's kinda like our senses are a USB port that we can plug any number of devices into and our brain automatically creates the drivers for.

Re:Zen for birds.

[relguj9]

What happens if you run out of battery power? What happens if the external provider of one of the necessary services stops providing that service?

Yes, I just said that in response to another guy who believes the belt to be of any more value than a proof of concept (belt is also limited by battery power and calibration).

The response I have is focusing on 3 words in your original post "in today's world". Like I said before, if you're in the woods or off the grid the belt is useful. Otherwise, the iPhone (as I felt was a humorous example) universally kicks its ass.

I think the concept proven by the belt is cool, and in a sense something we already knew from many other things (red flares in an FPS HUD telling you the direction of enemy fire that eventually become subconscious or even night vision goggles). I also think the concept has important applications (like the suit created to keep up/down orientation in flight).

However, the belt and a heightened sense of direction are, in today's world, useless 99.99% of the time. That's really all I was keying on, but apparently was taken very seriously and literally.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming that you live in the northern hemisphere, try going to the southern hemisphere, where the sun is due north at midday, instead of due south. Very confusing. I feel completely lost whenever I go there.

Re:Zen for birds.

[inhuman_4]

I have had a similar experience. I can usually tell where I am and what way is north pretty accurately. But when I moved to the city and started taking the subway/metro, I would get disoriented. As soon as I got underground I would loose my bearings.

It freaked me out the first few times. I would get the platform and have the sudden realization I had no idea which way was north, and hence which train to take. It's the kind of feeling you get when you reach in your pocket only to find you didn't bring your keys. I have lived in the city for 2 years now and I have become accustomed to loosing my sense of direction. But I wonder if given enough time I will adapt, any thoughts on this? Is there something city folk have learned that I am missing?

Re:Zen for birds.

[nanoakron]

You raise an interesting point.

On a slightly different tangent, I've lived without a watch for about 3 years now and find my internal 'timekeeping' to be far more accurate - I can usually guess the time of day to within a quarter hour and this often freaks out people who ask. Fun :)

-Nano.

Re:Zen for birds.

[jerAzevedo]

I usually know where I am indoors as well. I make a semi-conscious effort to find my direction before I enter a building, and tend to keep it going through elevators etc.

It's mostly memory. I orientate myself not with respect to north but with respect to reference points. Like right now I'm in my college town and I can point to my house and two cities. Knowing where those locations exist on a map I can also point fairly accurately anywhere on the planet.

I'm not sure how I'd do in Grand Central but I can imagine that I might go mad if I got lost. I would attempt to orientate myself as I moved but eventually I'd get confused. Most buildings make sense geometrically so it's fairly hard to get lost. I remember getting lost in a circular mall when I was younger. I ended up running back to where I came in and was afraid to head further in the mall until I understood the dynamics of a circular building (4 reference points inside the circle, 90 180 270 0).


I agree with some of the posters that having to rely on a bike and your feet to get places when you're younger might develop this "sense".

Re:Zen for birds.

[imhennessy]

I used to have a similar ability/disability. In college, I impressed friends with my directional ability, but would have to leave the mall and walk all the way around it to find where I was supposed to meet them.

I spent a huge chunk of my childhood walking in the woods and on back country roads. I still have an overconfidence while outside. Since I'm in Vermont, I basically know that as long as I go downhill, I'll reach a safe place. I sure hope I don't make that mistake in Southern California, or Israel, or any place which might require walking for more than four days to reach other humans.

Re:Zen for birds.

[mybadluck22]

Perhaps a watch that kept time more accurately would have been nice. 15 minutes off is pretty bad.

Re:Zen for birds.

[ShakaUVM]

>>and to this day I subconsciously know what way is north, no matter where I am

Yeah, that was the first thing I thought when I read this article.... people can do this already. We don't need vibrating belts to figure out north. Two nights ago I was in Paris, and got lost walking back to my hotel, and even when taking non-orthogonal streets I'd never seen before, ended up turning a corner and coming right to the front door.

I only get disoriented after taking a metro in an unfamiliar city, or if I fall asleep in a plane or something and wake up after dark. Then I ask someone which direction is north, and my direction sense resets.

It's actually kind of an interesting feeling - my brain will naturally assume a certain direction is north, even if I don't know, and when I find out which way actually IS north, it's like the world whirls around me and resets into position.

>>Humans already have the capacity for "mapmaking", it's not limited to birds.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting research on how humans map out spaces. As it turns out, your brain takes a shortcut - the act of walking spurs neural growth, so that your brain can learn a new area quickly. So you actually map out an area faster on foot than in a car, though of course a car lets you cover more ground in the same amount of time.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now take off the belt and change hemispheres. Wow, what happened?

Re:Zen for birds.

[Culture20]

It's not just how birds feel. People who spend the majority of their time outdoors, with the ability to see the sun, get the same feeling. Citydwellers have the unfortunate circumstance of generally not being able to judge direction by the location of the sun; people in rural areas don't have this problem.

People in Indiana and Arizona have a similar time-sense related to the Sun since they don't/didn't have daylight savings. I grew up in Indiana, and always knew within 5 minutes what time it was without a watch. Once I started living in Daylight savings time, I started getting confused (I wasn't just an hour off like you'd expect), and now I strategically place clocks around me so I can always see one.

Re:Zen for birds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, urban dwellers have a version of this themselves.

I can navigate the roads of where I know best (my home town, a few other towns, and a couple of cities that I've spent sufficient time trawling around) without thinking about them. I can get across a city mostly on roads I've never used before, just by the instinctive knowledge of where other roads might go. The sight of a minor local landmark (a tall building, say) poking its head over the cityscape is enough to update that subconscious mental map without even bothering the front part of the brain.

As you say, humans are good mapmakers. We can interpret whatever input we're given (sunlight, compass points or road routes) and build up a mental image of where we are. Devices like the navigation belt in TFA are a god send because they give our brains one more (extremely accurate and continuous) source of data to apply to the map.

Toys

[__aarvde6843]

Vibrators are soooo last century... Bring it on - the new sensory sex toys ;)

Hmm

[shellster_dude]

I am pretty sure that the first thought, of the mother and kids in the library, when they saw/heard your pants vibrating, did not involve your enhanced sense of direction.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. I'm pretty sure they realised he was pointing North.

Re:Hmm

[AndrewNeo]

If you can see vibration I think you're already a little ahead of the intent of the article!

Re:Hmm

[Hurricane78]

Why? I actually can see vibration. Are you slow, or why don't you? ^^

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you don't think the pointing didn't give away his enhanced sense of direction?

Re:Hmm

[Ksevio]

If I heard someone's pant's vibrating the conclusion I would jump to is their phone is ringing...

Been there, done that

[smooth wombat]

There are those of us who have an innate ability to navigate in any environment with little or no aid. I joke with people, who are completely flumoxed as to where they are and in which direction they should go, that they shouldn't worry. My internal GPS knows where we're at. Spacial orientation has just been one of those things I have.

Whether the grid pattern of Manhattan, the non-grid streets of Lower Manhattan or the uniquely French design of the maze known as Washington, D.C., for whatever reason, I can get to where I'm going almost every time without error.

In fairness, I must say that part of this ability is my being able to look at map and then, without looking at it again, orient myself on where I need to go. This applies even if I have to take a detour. Once I know where I'm at, I can get to any point I need.

Would this ability hold up in the Arctic north where there are no landmarks? Maybe, maybe not. But since I'm not one prone to visit cold climates, the world may never know (my apologies to the Tootsie Pop people).

Re:Been there, done that

[Red Flayer]

IMO, that's a learned ability. I have the same knack, and I attribute it to a rural upbringing where I schlepped on foot or on a bike a lot. Did you also grow up dependent on exertion for getting around (via foot or on bike)?

I use landmarks to determine progress, but my location, the route, and the destination are mapped in my head. If the map is there, I can easily recalculate my route if there are detours or other unexpected changes to the route.

Also, I always know (unless in a maze of twisty passages all alike) my orientation -- whenever I'm new to a place, I'm always looking for the sun to verify, until it becomes second nature. I do this subconsciously -- my wife comments on it whenever we're on a road trip, which is the only reason I noticed.

Re:Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether the grid pattern of Manhattan, the non-grid streets of Lower Manhattan or the uniquely French design of the maze known as Washington, D.C., for whatever reason, I can get to where I'm going almost every time without error.

Those are all pretty trivial.
Now if you manage what you claim in a place like Boston, then I might be impressed.

Re:Been there, done that

[smooth wombat]

Did you also grow up dependent on exertion for getting around (via foot or on bike)?

Yup. Rode my bike everywhere when I was younger. I also walked down to the local forests/clumps of trees and wandered about without issue.

I can't say I look at the sun when out and about, it's more that since I know what direction I'm heading, I know which way to turn. This works even inside buildings.

As far as landmarks are concerned, that is a double-edge sword. I've often said that I rely on landmarks to get to places so if a building is torn down in the meantime, I might be up the creek. :) However, the one time I needed a landmark was when I was driving to Edgewater, NJ to the Mitsuwa Marketplace. I hadn't been there in nearly a decade and I was a passenger at the time. All I could remember is it was on the road closest to the Hudson and that there were oil tanks across the street. My internal GPS got me there and yes, the oil tanks were still there.

Whether it's learned or innate, it serves me well. When people around me are confused, I simply tell them to follow me and miraculously we find our way out.

And yes, I did see your posting further down the page from mine with similar comments.

Re:Been there, done that

[SighKoPath]

Eh, I can do it just fine in Boston. It's easiest on foot or bike here, because then there's no need to worry about all the damn one-way streets. I can still manage just fine in a car, though. My friends generally wonder how I manage to do it, and I always tell them it's the map in my head. Going anywhere once is enough for me to be reliably able to get to anywhere else in the area I've already been. Glancing at a map is enough for me to be able to get anywhere new. I may not take the most optimal route, but I never get lost.

Like one of the previous posters, I grew up relying on my feet and a bike for most transportation, but in a suburban environment.

I still want one of those compass belts.

Re:Been there, done that

[shentino]

Just learn to plant 3 flags at a time...and when you're climbing the cliffs, don't stay out too long without warming up. Go below 27 degrees and you faint.

Re:Been there, done that

[hazem]

There are those of us who have an innate ability to navigate in any environment with little or no aid. I joke with people, who are completely flumoxed as to where they are and in which direction they should go, that they shouldn't worry. My internal GPS knows where we're at. Spacial orientation has just been one of those things I have.

I have a pretty good sense for this as well. I'm always correcting people when they mention some building and point in the totally wrong direction.

What's interesting is that I can tell when it's not working because I get a kind of dizziness or fuzzy feeling. One instance I recall vividly was when I had recently moved to town and had parked in a parking garage and after coming down several flights of stairs onto the street corner, it was completely overcast I had no idea which way was which and I almost felt a sense of mild vertigo, as if the world were swirling around me, as I tried to work out what direction was which. Once I had it figured out, the feeling went away.

Re:Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

Definately learned, though I think some people have more natural aptitude at this than others. I started learning to read and use city maps at a young age, then learned topographic maps, in my late teens I started exploring the catacombs under Paris.

Practice in all of these areas improves your natural ability. After running around in the complete chaos of the meandering tunnels under Paris for an hour, I can still point to north within a 15 degree arc. No sun to help, no distant reference points, only a trained inner ear.

Re:Been there, done that

[SalaSSin]

Apparently haven grown up in rural areas is good way to be able to train your internal gps for places without a lot of landmarks.

I grew up near a very wide stretch of dunes, where every dune looks *almost* the same, after a while of having to rely on slight differences, navigating in a city is just kids play, where every badly painted marking, every bump in the road, every lantern with a crack in it becomes a huge landmark...

Try it yourself, you look to big landmarks for general direction (i count the sun as a *very* big landmark, providing you're familiar with where the sun should be at a particular time of the day :D), and very small ones to be sure of where you are exactly.

Re:Been there, done that

[Red Flayer]

As far as landmarks are concerned, that is a double-edge sword. I've often said that I rely on landmarks to get to places so if a building is torn down in the meantime, I might be up the creek. :)

Heh. I tend to use landmarks just to verify my route; the thinking is something like, "OK, so I've gone 3.5 miles NE, now there *should* be a hillcrest running parallel to my route off to my left -- it's there, good." I don't use buildings for landmarks, since they are more transient than large landscape features (and I don't tend to go places that are very flat).

Reminds me of my wedding -- my wife made the mistake of letting me write the directions from hotel to church, and from church to reception. My guests all got a good laugh at my expense (once they all got to the reception) because apparently "Turn right out of church lot, head NE on Main street, follow 6.2 mi; turn left on Mine Rd, follow 4.6 mi; turn right on Country Club Dr, follow 1.6 mi." are very poor directions for most people. I still don't understand how half the guests screwed that up -- all streets were clearly marked (I checked when we sent the invites & again a week before the wedding).

My sister decided it would be humorous to present me with an astrolabe the next day at lunch, so I could make the directions for the next even even more esoteric.

Re:Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

find someone newly arrived to the northern hemisphere who grew up in the southern hemisphere and ask them to point north. Those with an good sense of direction will point due south.

Re:Been there, done that

[electrons_are_brave]

I also grew up biking and exploring on foot, but I have a very deficit sense of direction - it's all down to the hippocampus. It's kind of like singing - almost anyone can improve through practice, but if you are truly atonal nothing will help. If, on the other hand you are a born natural, you won't need the lessons. I'm arguing for SOD as largely inate, because I get so sick of people telling me that it's a matter of practice or attention. If you ain't got it, you ain't go it.

Re:Been there, done that

[johanatan]

If it's learned, then it's learned rather quickly. I was but a young lad of 3 or 4 years old with the same ability. I tend to think it was more nature than nurture given that few others have the same ability even as adults.

Re:Been there, done that

[im_thatoneguy]

I think it has more to do with the fact that most people simply don't recognize that it's OK to use side streets.

I usually navigate by "I need to be over *there*" and then simply trust that as long as I keep heading in the right direction I'll get there. It works 99.9% of the time. Doesn't help you find a house in the 'burbs but nothing does.

Lack of confidence I think causes more people to get lost than arrogance. There are exceptions of course. If you don't know which direction you need to head and generally the distance to your destination this method of navigation is impossible. I have a friend who is a worthless navigator. In highschool we would ask him at least once a week which direction north was. In the same room. In the same school. For at least 2 years. He still to this day can't reliably remember which direction north is. He is not a candidate for the "That Way" school of navigation.

Re:Been there, done that

[johannesg]

IMO, that's a learned ability. I have the same knack, and I attribute it to a rural upbringing where I schlepped on foot or on a bike a lot. Did you also grow up dependent on exertion for getting around (via foot or on bike)?

I have that as well, and I get around on bike a lot. And it ties into something that had me wondering for a while: while I can get around in the real world without ever getting lost, I cannot do the same in computer games. Apparently they just do not provide the right level of input for my senses to allow me to keep track of where I am.

Re:Been there, done that

[RockDoctor]

My sister decided it would be humorous to present me with an astrolabe the next day at lunch, so I could make the directions for the next even even more esoteric.

Did your sister know what an astrolabe was before she got you one? No, evidently not, otherwise she'd have not got you one.

I have the same make of internal GPS as you, I think (give or take a few thousand base-pairs). Naturally I also use the biggest landmarks around (sun, moon, stars) before resorting to smaller ones (buildings, slopes and topography, clouds, sounds ...).
Someone up-thread mentioned wondering if their iGPS would work in the far north? Well, my model works perfectly fine in northern Siberia and central Norway. It certainly works better then my wife's Zenit iGPS - in fact, I'm not at all sure if hers works at all. Mine also works south of the equator, though it is somewhat disconcerting to find that someone has put the sky on upside-down.

If I get to the South Shetland Islands, I'll report back on this iGPS' efficacy in the deep south.

Compass belt

[evanbd]

I built one of the compass belts. You don't need 13 motors. Four is plenty. Of course, you want finer resolution than just the four cardinal directions -- so you have the intensity of the vibration vary. If you make the strength of vibration of the motor vary sinusoidally with the angle, so that when a particular motor is pointing directly north it vibrates at full strength, and when directly south not at all, you'll get a very smooth response. You can easily resolve direction to 10-15 degrees precision with just four motors, and the analog response is less distracting than having motors suddenly turn on and off.

You can also do the analog response without a microprocessor -- the two-axis electronic compass sensors are really two sensors, each sensing the component of the field along their sensitive axis, which gives precisely the sin(theta) response curve you want. The microprocessor gets replaced by a couple op amps, and you cut the motor count dramatically, which saves a fair bit on the cost.

Power required to run the vibrator motors is noticeable. I get about 12-14 hours battery life from 4x NiMH AA cells. The next version will improve that a bit (PWM control instead of linear for the motors); the prototype was designed with circuit simplicity as the primary goal.

I don't have a complete schematic or parts list online; circuit design was done on paper and in my head while soldering it together. You can find a description and pictures here.

Re:Compass belt

[drinkypoo]

It would make a lot more sense to use piezos than vibrators. They also don't need to run constantly. I'm told that at high frequencies the piezo vibration resembles pressure more than vibration, but have no personal experience.

Re:Compass belt

[robably]

I wouldn't want a belt, but a piezoelectric armband might be less conspicuous and use less power. I can see these being built in to watch straps, too - your arm does change orientation much more often than your torso, which is presumably why they went with a belt, but combined with an accelerometer it wouldn't matter whether your arm was pointing up or down as the device could compensate.

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

I'll look into piezos. I've been meaning to build an updated version for a while now. Also, they *do* need to run constantly. How would it know when to run and when not to? With it constantly on, your brain tunes it out at a conscious level and you stop noticing it, but you still know what direction North is. Having it turn on or off would be distracting.

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

A proper version of the belt (surface mount components on a custom PCB, to reduce size) would be fairly inconspicuous. The batteries are the bulkiest component at that point, and even those aren't too large. The motors could be attached to a normal leather belt, and the remainder would be about the same size as a cell phone or pager, and comparably inconspicuous.

Reduced power would be a big improvement (lighter batteries and longer runtime would both be good). Do you have a suggested part for the piezo units?

Re:Compass belt

[robably]

Do you have a suggested part for the piezo units?

No, wouldn't know where to start looking. The closest I've used are electromagnetic relays (out of washing machines).
Maybe small locking sprung relays? Power pulls it inwards to touch your skin, it locks, when the direction changes the lock is released and the spring pulls it back and another relay is triggered. Power (for the relay) is only needed when you change direction. I've never seen relays that small, though. Ideally you'd want a watch strap with rubber dimples on the inside that raise and lower.

Thinking about it - I bet with piezos on a wristband you would be able to use it with them only being triggered when the direction changes and not constantly buzzing. To trigger it and sense north you just twist your wrist. Worth a shot to see if it would work.

The idea of using a belt just doesn't sit right with me - unless it's actually touching your skin it seems awfully wasteful of power. I'd go smaller.

Re:Compass belt

[robably]

surface mount components on a custom PCB, to reduce size

Or an iPhone app plus an armband connected by a wire or bluetooth. There's a million dollar idea for you.

Re:Compass belt

[drinkypoo]

Also, they *do* need to run constantly. How would it know when to run and when not to?

No, I mean, it can just send short pulses every second or so.

Having it turn on or off would be distracting.

Having it at all would be distracting, until you got used to it.

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

Also, they *do* need to run constantly. How would it know when to run and when not to?

No, I mean, it can just send short pulses every second or so.

That's far more distracting than continuous.

Having it turn on or off would be distracting.

Having it at all would be distracting, until you got used to it.

Getting used to it takes a few hours. Then you don't really notice it unless you pay attention to it specifically.

Re:Compass belt

[drinkypoo]

No, I mean, it can just send short pulses every second or so.

That's far more distracting than continuous.

It might train your direction sense faster as a result. There's only one good way to find out...

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

surface mount components on a custom PCB, to reduce size

Or an iPhone app plus an armband connected by a wire or bluetooth. There's a million dollar idea for you.

Why? The iPhone doesn't have the sensors you need, and even if it did, you don't want the output changing as you move your phone. Besides, the components required to do Bluetooth are as complicated as the components needed to do the entire thing self-contained.

Re:Compass belt

[robably]

True, it's an order of magnitude more complicated than building the belt. The iPhone has GPS and an accelerometer now, and is apparently getting a magnetometer in the next revision.

But you're right, there is a problem with the orientation of the armband being different to that of the iPhone. It would have to be a belt with a pocket in it for the iPhone which would make the whole thing just as big (and far more complex) than the one you built. Unless you put more electronics in the armband itself, by which point there'd be so much duplication between the two that the iPhone would be redundant.

I am not a millionaire.

Re:Compass belt

[JesseMcDonald]

I don't think the GP meant that the user would manually turn the belt on and off, but rather that you could get the same effect by running the motors/piezos in short bursts every couple of seconds. The lower duty cycle should considerably increase your battery life.

Re:Compass belt

[orclevegam]

Why not have it pulse, say every 5 seconds. As a bonus it might also improve your sense of time, assuming it wasn't already good to begin with.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

"How would it know when to run and when not to?"
Maybe a gradual fade to stop action when the motors have been running for a certain period of time (a couple seconds or so..).
Of course it would increase power consumption a bit...
A fade back in to full strength action when you move again? Oh...right...
Um..put a motion/vibration sensor of some type in?
Obviously IANAEE.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so what happens when the magnetic poles shift? (repeatedly)...

Re:Compass belt

[Stray7Xi]

Wouldn't a mild current be better? It would eliminate the issues with sound/vibration, and it should cause the batteries to last longer. Granted it would require direct contact to skin, but I would think something could easily be done by wiring the lining of underwear. The compass, power and electronics would be in a detachable unit, so it'd be completely washable (probably would want low heat for dryer). I suspect once you get some practice (with a decent plan) it wouldn't take more then a few minutes to wire a new set of underwear. It'd be cheap and invisible but you'd have to calibrate the compass based on where you clip it.

I was actually thinking a while ago of a similar project. It would have several antennas (or ultrasonic emitters) and similar electrical feedback to act as a shortrange radar. So you'd be able to sense things behind you. Perhaps use a pulsed doppler system it could track range, speed and cross-section size. With a little computation it could even predict if something will hit you at an unsafe speed (spidey sense!). The main problem is where it could be put without a lot of noise, if it was a belt your arms would interfere with it. A collar would probably work best but it'd be fugly.

Re:Compass belt

[Protocron]

I agree with the idea of smaller. What about a necklace or a choker.

Re:Compass belt

[robably]

Or a buzzing or pipping played through headphones? That's about the smallest and lowest power I can think of, but much more distracting than the necklace/belt/armband and less accurate as it's only two points of reference. Could have different pitch for facing North or South, though.

Or LEDs on the inside of spectacle frames? Green when facing North, red for South.

Re:Compass belt

[bill_kress]

I think the point here is to have something that creates a new "Sense" not something that tells you which way is north. A compass can tell you which way is north.

That said, I wonder if a small choker might do a better job. Something with very small vibrators that fit around your neck where you are more sensitive.

Of course, the less sensitive waist might be chosen deliberately since those senses aren't used for much except to ensure that your ass-crack is covered.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

And, instead of making it a belt, put it around the ankle (in a sock's elastic?) or in the shoe. That strikes me as being the most comfortable, least visible place to wear it.

Like a watch on the wrist to keep track of time, a piezo-compass on the ankle to keep direction.
IMHO, the belt is for keeping the pants up.

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

Because intermittent sensations are more distracting than continuous ones, and harder for your brain to tune out. Also, make the interval too long, and you can turn a fair amount without getting an update, which doesn't help your internal mapmaking. This is the same reason you want analog output rather than individual motors that are either on or off.

Re:Compass belt

[evanbd]

Several people have suggested this. It doesn't work. Sudden changes are distracting. The goal is to have your brain stop treating the sensation as a vibration, so you don't notice that aspect any more, and treat it like a new sense. It really does operate like a new sense, btw -- you simply know which way is North. Your brain is not built to handle pulsed senses, so it won't treat pulsed input properly.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what kind of belt you are referring to, so may I suggest something that gets worn next to skin? The motors could be on pads that are adjustable around a strap (for different sized users). It may allow you to use lighter motors because they don't have to vibrate your pants.

I do feel, though, that having more motors might be more comfortable. Perhaps 8? I recognize that this opinion is pure speculation.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, attach that pheromone sensor to your underwear, then. You will be able to turn your 'antenna' to the horniest girls around...

Re:Compass belt

[JesseMcDonald]

Who said anything about sudden changes? You could ramp the vibration up over a set period, and then back down again. Setting it to slowly cycle on and off at random intervals rather than a predictable pattern would also make it feel more natural, and cut down on the level of distraction.

The brain isn't exactly built to translate continuous vibration into a sense of direction, either. The low-power version of the belt may take longer to get used to, but I have no doubt the brain would adapt to it in the end, just as it adapts to utilize the unnatural input from the continuous variant.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so now if a slashdot geek actually gets in bed with a girl, taking off his pants and shirt he will suddenly get dizzy and disoriented, and miss out on what will probably be his only chance to reproduce...

This will go down in history as the doom of all geeks everywhere.

Re:Compass belt

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no real reason that a belt needs to be conspicuous or overly power-consuming.

Making a slim (even stylish) belt would be easy, if it weren't for the big vibrating/electrifying devices involved in the design. Presuming you could make a vibrating motor slim enough to fit in a wrist band, there's no reason you couldn't make a belt exactly as slim and inoffensive.

Assuming the technology is there for a slim, low-power wrist band, a slim low-power belt would be easy.

And besides, and arm band would be a nightmare to design. Your arms change orientation so often you wouldn't know where you were pointing, and if you need a secondary sensor on the body to avoid false-positives you're just adding extra kit to a simple job.

Re:Compass belt

[Protocron]

Hmmm, interesting. A little earing that makes a very light tone when you are facing North.

Radio would be fun to see

[praetorblue]

It'd be fascinating to see radio waves, overlaid on your normal vision.

Any radio science buffs have ideas of what it would look like?

I'm guessing it'd be a constant semi-transparent haze. But since radio waves are directional, and some are limited by varying altitudes, I'd imagine there must be some gradation you could perceive.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Alarindris]

You wouldn't likely see anything at all. When you see light, you don't see the actual beams, you see what is reflected off of objects. With radio passing through just about everything, you probably couldn't see anything.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[evanbd]

The long wavelength would make it tricky. What it would look like would depend on how you rendered them, I suppose. The real problem is the diffraction limit -- without a really large sensor, you can't get a very useful resolution. Remember, your eyes have an aperture (pupil) size about 10,000 times larger than the wavelengths of interest. So any vision based on wavelengths in the centimeter range (2.4 GHz wireless is 125mm, compared to 550nm for green light) will be *really* blurry unless you're carrying a gigantic antenna array.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[TinBromide]

I've thought about this but since radio waves tend to pass through most materials, you'd probably be very aware of sources of radio waves (towers). It might be akin to living in a glass house where you don't have any light bulbs in the house. Radio waves tend to reflect off of hard surfaces, which results in a special form of interference known as multi-path, so there would be some reflections, but you'd probably find yourself not seeing anything transparent to radio waves.

That and due to the inverse square law, the amount of radio waves a safe distance away from radio towers would be very hard to detect and all in all, everything would be very very dark...

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Aqualung812]

You can still see light sources. I would assume you'd be see every radio source, from your cell phone to your speakers.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly suggest you go look directly at the sun and see just how not seeing beams of light hurts.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Chyeld]

When you see light, you most assuredly do 'see' the actual beams, as they bounce off objects. That is the entire mechanic.

As such, if you were to come up with a magical "radio wave" detector that worked just as eyes do, you'd see areas in your FOV which were 'brighter' as radio waves bounced off them or something actually emitted them (similar to a light bulb).

And as a resident of an urban environment that has to deal with bounced TV signals screwing up my reception all the time, I can assure you that while the waves pass through alot, there is also alot they don't quite make it through. And given our modern society is chock full of radio transmiters (from RFID to cell phones to unintentional items such as computer equipment) you shouldn't have a problem with 'illumination'.

The real question would be: how would you map the various radio wave lengths to what your eyes would actually be able to see? Visible light is a very small portion of the EM spectrum.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Angst Badger]

Due to the wavelengths involved, your radio "eyes" would have to be quite large to get any kind of resolution at all. Depending on the frequencies you want to be able to see, we could be talking meters.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[UncleTogie]

You wouldn't likely see anything at all. When you see light, you don't see the actual beams, you see what is reflected off of objects. With radio passing through just about everything, you probably couldn't see anything.

Silly question: What am I seeing, then, when I look at a clear lightbulb that's on...other than a bright light?

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[ultranova]

The real question would be: how would you map the various radio wave lengths to what your eyes would actually be able to see?

The best solution would be to bypass your eyes entirely and simply map the thing directly to your vision cortex. Use a phased array of implanted wires to get 360 degree detection, combine with a microprocessor to translate the info into amplitude and frequency in every direction, and this data in paired cables into the brain. Sure, it would be an utter mess at first, but after a few weeks you should be able to make sense of it.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Ecuador]

I'm not a radio expert but you'd probably see things like "wkxy 102.3 love radio" scrolling before your eyes...

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Your eyes have a lens, which excludes all light that is not coincident to your field of view.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Light waves have a frequency, therefor they can be considered part of the radio spectrum. If you are saying you want to see the entire spectrum, just look at the sun! Ow, My Eyes! My Eyes!!

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[orngjce223]

Photons are bumping into your rod/cone cells, changing the conformations of a bunch of molecules. When those molecules change shape they send signals down into your brain.

Re:Radio would be fun to see

[inject_hotmail.com]

I think the parent poster meant that one wouldn't see the radio waves as they pass through one's field of vision (i.e. from my cell phone to the tower), even though you could see those waves that reflect directly into one's eyes (i.e. from my cell phone off the conveniently placed Faraday Cage, and then into my eye)...

I have also wondered and contemplated the idea of visualizing radio waves. Quite an interesting prospect. One would have to have some means of wavelength selection. Processing the entire known/used spectrum would be insane. It would likely require some sort of compression of the spectrum to make it visible as well, but, where could one find something as trippy?

We have SEVEN senses

[inviolet]

This "five senses" garbage is a favorite example of mine for illustrating how everyone, everywhere, including textbooks, can be obviously mistaken about something 'factual'.

Our sixth sense is accelleration, and the sense organ responsible for this is the semicircular canals in our inner ear. It's how we know where 'down' is, and life would be difficult without this sense. Our seventh sense is proprioception, derived from muscle feedback all over the body.

These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.

Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[panthroman]

These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.

By that definition, why not count your sense of humor?

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[7Prime]

Sounds about like a flying Segway (Stealth Bomber)

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately you appear to have fallen into your own trap.

What about other senses, for example nociception or thermoception, to name but a few?

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[EvanED]

Our seventh sense is proprioception, derived from muscle feedback all over the body.

"Proprioception" is one of my favorite words (I'm disappointed to see it's not in the Firefox spell checking dictionary). I even coined the term "vehicular proprioception" for the "sense" of knowing how close you are to hitting stuff when you're driving around in a car. (I got pretty refined vehicular proprioception at my last apartment when it often took 3 or 4 drivereverse transitions to get out of my parking space because of short distances between cars.)

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Angst Badger]

Depending on how fine you slice it, we have a lot more than five (or six) senses. There are four kinds of receptors in the eyes, five on the tongue, and more than a dozen for smell. Even something as simple as the sense of touch can be broken down into pressure and temperature (and probably something else that I'm forgetting), each with its own specialized nerves to detect the appropriate stimulus. Then there are the meta-senses that are assembled by the brain from raw sensory data: varying pressure on the skin over time as you drag your fingers over a surface gets translated into a very distinct "sense" of texture, and vision and hearing are a cornucopia of derived senses.

While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[germansausage]

The curved upper surface of the wing produces lift somehow. The upward lift force is equal to the downward force of gravity (equal forces in opposite directions). As soon as a plane rolls inverted the lift from the wing and the downward force of gravity are acting in the same direction and the aircraft immediately accelerates downward at 2 g (19.6 m/s/s).

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[91degrees]

I even coined the term "vehicular proprioception" for the "sense" of knowing how close you are to hitting stuff when you're driving around in a car.

I think this sort of thing is quite amazing. That and how my senses can map onto the controls of a car so I can accelerate, brake and turn in a manner that works in no way like my body, without even thinking about it.

And you'll be pleased to hear that the British Firefox dictionary contains proprioception (although oddly not "Firefox").

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't proprioception not a sense by that very definition? It aggregates certain channels of data provided by your sense of touch.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[dontmakemethink]

Our "sense of direction" is a cognitive property, not a sense, no more than our "sense of humor".

Similarly I consider proprioception to fall under the "touch" category, since it uses the same nerve endings. If you separate proprioception then the same logic can say temperature is another sense, texture another, pain, wind, etc. They're all cognitive interpretations of the same stimuli apparatus.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[KevinKnSC]

While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?

Careful, it's a short jump from there to the TimeCube.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[imamac]

While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?

Even when I was in middle/high school (20 years ago) we learned 4 states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[mark-t]

why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?

It's infactual to say that mass only exists as solid, liquid, or gas, but not equally infactual to make the same claim about matter, because matter doesn't have a precise scientific definition. Matter linguistically conveys with it a notion of tangibility that simply does not exist anywhere but inside those three states. Because all matter has mass, it is not uncommon for the two terms to be used interchangeably, but this causes confusion. And that's really the source of the problem, not teaching kids that there are three states of matter, per se.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect.

Plane does not take off.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I think this sort of thing is quite amazing. That and how my senses can map onto the controls of a car so I can accelerate, brake and turn in a manner that works in no way like my body, without even thinking about it.

It's more than that. While I can't find the link, there have been studies that show that people use their car's body (and virtually any handheld tool used frequently) like an extension of their arm. When faced with a head-on collision with no time for conscious thought, people still automatically turned the car to try and make sure the impact hit the passenger side of the vehicle, just as you would raise an arm to ward off a punch. Never mind that the car is actually better designed to take the collision in the front, your body isn't aware of that. The cerebellum's function is to make commonly repeated actions, whether with your body or tools, become second nature. Learning to walk and learning to drive are really the same. You're just repeating an action consciously until the patterns are mapped to the cerebellum, which makes them "automatic".

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Anonymous Coward]

> proprioception to fall under the "touch"

No, just no.

It is different, there are several tests for this, as well as impairments which affect both separately.
I'm not entirely sure of the exact mechanism for proprioception, but it is not the same as touch AFAIK.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[DMUTPeregrine]

But there's also triple-point (solid/liquid/gas at the same time) and supercritical (liquid/gas at the same time). Not as distinct as the other 4, but still important.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Anonymous Coward]

Triple-point was mentioned to me in middle school (10 years ago) but more as a curiosity and it wasn't really focused on. I guess it was effective though? Because I still remember it...

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[juancnuno]

It's even more than seven. There's the sense of temperature, pain, and internal body senses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Randle_Revar]

Plasma is tangible. I bet if you touch it, you will be able to tell that you are touching it (or rather that you where touching it, until your hand vaporized).

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[mark-t]

I'd bet you could say the same thing about the freezing vacuum of space, which unless you are advocating the existence of the aether, is by definition devoid of virtually all matter.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Tomfrh]

Good post.

Another ubiquitous factual error you find in textbooks is the one about resonance destroying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. We've known for 50 years that it wasn't an example of forced resonance...

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Vintermann]

"While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?"

Well, we don't, but those three are the ones they're most likely to encounter, unless they play around with microwave ovens. As for supercritical and triple-point, give me a break.

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Soporific]

Out of all the senses, this one is probably the most enjoyable.

~S

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[tomzyk]

These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.

By that definition, why not count your sense of humor?

Because people that constantly complain with "there aren't really 5 senses! there are 6 (or 9 or 11 etc...)!!!" most likely do not HAVE a sense of humor. It would be like counting Electroception as a human sense, despite the fact that noone has it.

Vincent Antonelli: Here ya go... What's the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb.
[distinct pause and no response from the humorless opponent]
Vincent Antonelli: You can unscrew a lightbulb!
[still no reaction out of the humorless opponent]
Vincent Antonelli: See? No sense of humor whatsoever!

Re:We have SEVEN senses

[Thing 1]

obEmoPhilips: "I used to think ... I used to think that the brain was the most interesting organ in the body. Then I thought, look what's telling me that!"

In Osnabruck

[srussia]

" I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."

I would hope so. For this watchman "Wachter" to get lost in his town would be like me getting lost in my bathroom.

This is so old

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this article at least a year back; why is this important now?

perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[panthroman]

Only recently have we realized that cows and deer have a sense of magnetic direction. Just this month, the same group found that power lines can muddle the cattle's sense of direction.

It's a stretch, but is it possible we humans have a weak magnetic sense that's simply drowned out by urban noise?

Surely there have been studies on this. Anyone?

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG you have just discovered cold fusion! Cows are clearly superconducting, because they're magnetic and frictionless, so they naturally rotate towards magnetic north!

Yeah, and that has nothing to do with the fact that fences usually run either N/S or E/W, or that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and if you live north of the tropics (as most cattle in the northern hemisphere do), then facing north guarantees that you'll never have sun in your eyes.

(Hint: Cows point north, but not necessarily magnetic north, which can be off by a VERY large margin in some areas.)

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is known that we humans have a similar sense that we simply haven't been using (disuse leads to weakness, both in brain and muscle).

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[panthroman]

(Hint: Cows point north, but not necessarily magnetic north, which can be off by a VERY large margin in some areas.)

The disparity between polar north and magnetic north is exactly what led the researchers to conclude that the cattle are EMF sensing. From the 2008 paper:

"To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north."

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[Smurf]

Hmmm... someone didn't even read the abstracts that were given to him.

panthroman already pointed out that the first study specifically addresses the fact that the animals tend to face the magnetic and not the geographic north.

From the abstract of the other paper:

Body orientation of cattle and roe deer was random on pastures under or near power lines. Moreover, cattle exposed to various magnetic fields directly beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions exhibited distinct patterns of alignment. The disturbing effect of the ELFMFs on body alignment diminished with the distance from conductors.

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[anonymousNR]

this one maybe

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[Culture20]

That might explain why joggers with earbuds (tiny electro-magnets inside the head) are always running in the street instead of on the sidewalks.

Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have?

[sliverstorm]

I still am not sure about that cows having magnetic sense thing. Birds I can accept, but the very first thoughts to cross my mind when I heard about cows:

1: Grazing lands are usually lands people don't want to live in

2: The southern face is more livable and hospitable.

Those two facts suggest to me that it's possible on a global scale cows are mostly on a certain face of a hill. Supposing most cows are on the southern slope, could it not be possible they simply elect to face uphill?

I'm not saying my speculations are any kind of proof, that they are well supported, or anything else like that. Only reasons the scientists may not have found the true cause. As they say, correlation does not imply causation.

Sensing a good story for Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes the editors have it.

Sometimes they don't.

We have 23 senses

[Anonymous Coward]

In my biological psychology class, we covered 23 distinct senses that provide use with environmental information.

Re:We have 23 senses

[evanbd]

In addition to the usual five, I can easily come up with acceleration / balance, proprioception, and temperature (though I suppose you could count that with touch). I suppose you could count time as well. What else did you list as distinct senses?

Re:We have 23 senses

[selven]

That's just external senses. Now let's add some internal ones: Thirst Hunger Pain Bladder Sleepiness Any others?

Re:We have 23 senses

[Anonymous Coward]

fnord.

Re:We have 23 senses

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Thirst and hunger are basically the same sense, mediated by conscious thought. This is why one of the first things anyone should do when dieting is to remember to drink more water; oftentimes they overeat because no amount of food will turn off the body's combined "hunger/thirst" system if the problem is dehydration. Pain is just a specific form of touch, as is the bladder full feeling. Sleepiness isn't really a sense; it doesn't detect any environmental information, being based on a combination of input from vision (is it dark?) and your circadian rhythm (which is simply a low accuracy internal clock constantly synchronized by vision).

I think 23 is really pushing it.

Re:We have 23 senses

[hamburgler007]

Explosive diarrhea?

Re:We have 23 senses

[MobyDisk]

I thought temperature == touch as well, but you can sense your own internal temperature separately from surface temperature.

Re:We have 23 senses

[Anonymous Coward]

The internal temperature sensing is mostly a combination of blood pressure and temperature differential vs the ambient temperature.

Re:We have 23 senses

[Eravau]

To quote an earlier post, see the Wikipedia entry on "senses".

I can see a use

[rs232]

I can see a use for pilots to help in navigation, an all over body suit with electrodes and a HUD interacting with vibrations and colors to produce a map he can feel, as in turbulence would be more viscous that clear air. Or incoming obstables, the vibration to get your attention and the color on the HUD to tell you what it is. You could also combine it with sound ..
--

Requesting records in non-MS formats FoF 381002R Mar 03 2009

Re:I can see a use

[Anonymous Coward]

a HUD interacting with vibrations and colors to produce a map he can feel, as in turbulence would be more viscous that clear air. Or incoming obstables, the vibration to get your attention and the color on the HUD to tell you what it is. You could also combine it with sound ..

LSD should be enough.

Just makes sense

[mcrbids]

We are entering an age of information awareness. We literally have machines that can now read our minds. We would be remiss to not take advantage of this!

I'm a pilot, and for a long time, I stubbornly stuck to the "old way" of navigation using VOR radio navigation rather than the newer GPS-based systems. Basically, every 50 miles or so, there's a radio beacon that broadcasts a directional radio signal that you can triangulate from. My logic was that virtually all planes have some kind of VOR in them, while perhaps 1/3 of planes have GPS units.

But I recently "bit the bullet" and learned to use the GPS in the newer rental plane at the local airport. I noticed it immediately: what a difference! Last week, I flew to an airport I hadn't landed at before - something that's always just a bit nerve-racking with radio navigation due to the unfamiliarity. Typically, I've made it a habit to fly in direct to the "new" airport 1,000 feet above the local traffic pattern to get my bearings and prepare an approach - adding a fair amount of time circling around and so on.

But with the GPS locating me to within a few feet on a "moving map", I was confidently making calls as to my location and whereabouts, and made a direct base approach right to the numbers on the runway! No hunting, no worries about traffic patterns. Just straight in.

No, I didn't surgically implant the GPS unit, but it's clearly a case of technology using the sense of sight to improve informational awareness. I'm all for it! If I could (safely) have a bluetooth display of my mobile phone surgically implanted into my brain so that I could, at any time, access google maps, etc. it would dramatically change how I interface with the world. Just think of the advantages:

1) I'd never get lost.

2) I'd be able to look up new words and concepts as needed, seamlessly.

3) I'd be able to make use of "dead time" such as while driving/flying. (most of the latter is spent at cruise altitude letting the auto-pilot get you there)

This is the future. We already approximate it with our mobile phones - technology will become ever more intimate as we approach the technology singularity.

Get ready for it! Weeeeeeeh!

Re:Just makes sense

[Red Flayer]

This is the future. We already approximate it with our mobile phones - technology will become ever more intimate as we approach the technology singularity.

Until we run out of the materials needed to maintain the ubiquity of technology (or they become scarce enough to be too expensive for ubiquitous use).

I'm no luddite, but there are tons of costs associated with technology... and I wonder how long we can support those costs, and what we're willing to do to ensure continued access to those requirements. Economic war? Physical war? Continued (or even more) dependence upon near-slave labor?

There are a myriad set of things necessary for things like GPS. What happens if we can no longer afford to support all of them? What do we pick and choose to let go? I envision a future where we justify agressive international action based upon our economic requirements to sustain an intrinsically unsustainable economy, simply because we are dependent on expensive technology for our every need and want.

In other words, enjoy it while it lasts... because it won't last forever.

Re:Just makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

'3) I'd be able to make use of "dead time" such as while driving/flying. '

better dead time, than dead time

Re:Just makes sense

[fabs64]

A pessimist is usually right but only an optimist will change the world.

Re:Just makes sense

[Soporific]

I doubt it.

~S

Re:Just makes sense

[CoyoteNZ]

I envision a future where we justify agressive international action based upon our economic requirements to sustain an intrinsically unsustainable economy, simply because we are dependent on expensive technology for our every need and want.

like ensuring a cheap supply of oil from the middle east for example?

Re:Just makes sense

[Culture20]

We are entering an age of information awareness. We literally have machines that can now read our minds. We would be remiss to not take advantage of this!
I'm a pilot, and

... you'd be willing to think in Russian to fly your plane?

See Hear

[Tablizer]

I once read where some researchers learned to "read" spoken words from printed sound spectragrams, where frequency (in various shades based on density) is on one axis and time on the other. This made me wonder whether deaf people couldn't also learn to read them at a near real-time pace with practice. At the time a custom-manufactured device seemed like the way to go, but now an off-the-shelf hand-held computer/phone/PDA is probably up to the task with the right software and mike.

Re:See Hear

[7Prime]

I'm guessing that quite a few audio engineers can do that from a simple waveform (without colorcoded FFT). I do quite a bit of audio production, both for music and for TV. No, I haven't yet learned how to distinguish exact phonetics, but if I know what a person is saying, I can pretty easilly tell which sound goes where. It's taught me a lot about speech phrasing and aspiration. Abviously, without some kind of FFT deliniation (as you were talking about), it would be very difficult to tell the difference between "To Do" and "Go To".

Re:See Hear

[Fnordulicious]

> I once read where some researchers learned to "read" spoken words from printed sound spectragrams,
> where frequency (in various shades based on density) is on one axis and time on the other.

Many if not most graduate programs in linguistics have at least one class that covers auditory and acoustic phonetics. A large part of such a class consists of learning to read the distinctive features of human speech in spectrograms, such as the spacing and movement of vowel formants, the length and regular but staccato patterns of sound and silence, the distribution of noise in fricatives and aspiration, the "voice bar" in voiced consonants, and so forth. Professional meetings of phoneticians often include some sort of entertaining contest that involves reading spectrograms of unknown speech and determining the language used, transcribing the utterance, figuring out the sex of the speaker, and other similar challenges.

Once you understand the essentials of how the human vocal apparatus works, it's not very difficult to read spectrograms of languages you know well. Gaining fluency doesn't take too much practice once you understand what to look for.

> This made me wonder whether deaf people couldn't also learn to read them at a near real-time
> pace with practice.

Unfortunately, probably not. Part of what makes for fluency in reading spectrograms is the ability to model potential utterances in your head according to what makes sense from the spectrographic data. This requires that you have working knowledge of what vocal speech sounds like and how vocal speech sounds are produced, as well as some knowledge of the language being spoken. People who are deaf from an early age generally lack any sort of mental model of vocal speech, and must go through arduous training to gain even the most basic ability to process or produce vocal speech. The coordination involved in vocal speech production is astonishingly complicated, much more so than playing a piano, so it's not something one can pick up without either instinct (as infants) or extensive effort. So deaf people who never had functional hearing (and hence never experienced vocal speech) would be at an incredible disadvantage in reading spectrograms because they would lack the intuitive sense of the vocal apparatus, and so would probably have just as much trouble with spectrograms as they would with comprehending vocal speech through other means. (BTW, I use the term "vocal speech" to differentiate what most humans do from signed speech used by deaf people, which though a perfectly reasonable form of realtime human linguistic communication, doesn't involved the human vocal or auditory systems. The term "speech" just covers any sort of immediate, non-written linguistic communication, and can include signed speech depending on who you ask.)

On the other hand, it might be very useful for people who lost their hearing later in life. Since they would retain most if not all of the sense of their vocal apparatus and the sounds of vocal speech in their brains, it might not be too hard for them to adapt the perception to a different medium. I'm not a speech-language pathologist nor an audiologist, so I'm not familiar with the literature and can't say for sure, but it sounds plausible from my linguistic perspective.

One other thing I should mention is that the typical spectrogram is not actually representative of what we hear, it's representative of what our microphones and recording equipment measure. We are not exactly sure yet what transformations occur between the tympanic membrane and the auditory nerves, but we know for certain that what we hear is not the same as what we see in spectrograms. Instead, the auditory canal, small bones, and cochlea all function as filters and amplifiers in various frequency ranges, warping the incoming sounds into something rather different from what is detected by microphones. We use cochleagrams (like spectrograms but with the audio signal warped appropriately) to approximate what we think is transmitted from the cochlea to the brain, but there are several competing models and no real consensus yet because of the difficulty of experimenting with such an extremely delicate part of the human body.

Re:See Hear

[Tablizer]

Interesting. Note that although you learned how to interpret them via learning "throat mechanics" etc., that does not necessarily mean that's the only way to interpret/translate them. A good portion of it is just old-fashioned pattern recognition, which many people can do fairly well with enough practice. Even (artificial) neural nets can do fairly well at this. However, neural nets lack one necessary feature:

A big part of interpretation is *context*. Often when people dictate word spellings or serial numbers over the phone, "f" versus "s", and "d" versus "t" are nearly impossible to tell apart. Just about everyone gets them wrong if done "raw". Phone lines simply chop out some useful frequencies. This is part of why the military developed the "alpha charley bravo" convention. But the f/s/d/t thing usually does not matter that much in normal phone conversation because we use a lot of topical context to distinguish between potential interpretative alternatives.
       

Bernoulli

[wonkavader]

"Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect."

Heck, yeah. It's nutty and irresponsible how we pump everyone full of the Bernoulli effect with respect to flight. With low power systems, you probably need the Bernoulli effect, but the more power you have, the more we're talking about a sled/surfboard, rather than an airfoil. This is true in old Cesnas, for goodness sake, and they are tiny and light. Still, the wing generally isn't giving you quite enough lift to keep you up when you fly with the nose completely flat. You MUST have some sledding angle against the oncoming airstream to maintain altitude.

Re:Bernoulli

[inviolet]

Still, the wing generally isn't giving you quite enough lift to keep you up when you fly with the nose completely flat. You MUST have some sledding angle against the oncoming airstream to maintain altitude.

No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.

You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.

Re:Bernoulli

[icebrain]

No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.

Actually, the B-52 can often be seen flying nose down in level flight. It takes off and lands fuselage-level.

Why?

Because it's not the fuselage angle that matters, it's the angle of attack relative to the wing. And the B-52's wing is set so that it is at a positive angle of attack relative relative to the oncoming air when the fuselage is level. This pre-set wing angle is called "incidence".

For small angles of attack, you can generally assume that a graph of lift vs. angle of attack is linear. A symmetrical wing will have an X-intercept of 0 (so at zero angle of attack, you get no lift). Adding positive camber slides that X-intercept negative, so to get zero lift you actually need a negative angle of attack. You will also have positive lift at zero angle of attack.

I think the discussions about AOA and other topics are covered far too lightly in most pilot training courses. It also seems to me that it would be very useful to put all new students into some kind of simulator (even just a PC fighter sim) with a heads-up display showing nose "boresight" and a flight path marker, and demonstrating the relationship between alpha, weight, lift, and airspeed in a format that is clearly visible and understandable. Even just 20 or 30 minutes of this might give them a far better understanding of what's actually happening when they're flying.

Yes, I'm a private pilot too. And when I eventually get around to building my airpane, it's going to have a nice prominent AOA indicator, which is far superior to just airspeed for slow flight, maneuvering, and landing.

Re:Bernoulli

[tweak13]

At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot. You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.

Sorry, but that's simply untrue. A "Bernoulli wing" (normally referred to as a cambered wing) will produce lift at zero and even negative angles of attack. They aren't in any way more prone to stalling, and are almost universally used on modern aircraft. Modern computer simulation has produced wing sections that have dramatically increased lift/drag ratios and reduced separation compared to symmetric sections.

Bernoulli's effect is nothing more than conservation of energy. You can see it's effects on any surface that produces lift, no matter if it's cambered, symmetrical, or just a flat plate. Conservation of energy demands that when air is in the high pressure region under a wing it slows down. Air in the low pressure region above the wing speeds up. It's a simple exercise to prove that these high and low pressure regions exist with a wing section in a wind tunnel. Add a hot-wire anemometer to the wind tunnel and you can see the speed changes as well. I've done several such experiments myself.

A few disclaimers apply, this only works at mach numbers below about 0.3 Above that airflows start to show the effects of compression. It also only works outside the wing's boundary layer, where viscous effects dominate. Air under mach 0.3 and away from a surface can be treated as incompressible and inviscid. Bernoulli effect only applies in inviscid and incompressible flows.

Yes, I'm a pilot. I also have a degree in aerospace engineering.

Re:Bernoulli

[MobyDisk]

I fly hang gliders, and even we consider the Bernoulli effect to be overstated. This is mentioned in Hang Gliding and Paragliding Magazine periodically.

Re:Bernoulli

[Anonymous Coward]

A hang glider is really just a rigid parachute that shoves the majority of air out the back.

Re:Bernoulli

[inviolet]

You chose an interpretation of my comments that allowed you to criticize me, congratulations.

When I said a "Bernoulli wing that can accomplish the same thing as [AOA]" I meant it literally. Have you ever calculated how much hump would be required to fly without AOA? And how would that wing perform in other areas of the flight envelope?

We are perfectly aware that aircraft have asymmetrical wings, but they do so primarily to prevent separation. Whether this also creates Bernoulli lift is not a design goal.

Re:Bernoulli

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's going to have a nice prominent AOA indicator, which is far superior to just airspeed for slow flight, maneuvering, and landing.

Whatever became of just taping a tassel onto the windshield? And a wind vane on the wing strut? And while you're at it, a sight glass for the fuel tank? The wire poking out of the fuel cap is a suitable alternative. I mean you're already flying. Take the time to enjoy the view. Don't forget a rag to wipe the caster oil off your goggles.

Holy Dupe Batman!

[SatanicPuppy]

This was cool when I first read it...in 2007.

And it was cool when I was in the Slashdot thread as well.

Re:Holy Dupe Batman!

[SatanicPuppy]

In case anyone was wondering, I was totally fucking interesting in that thread...

Can we repost the next article in the series soon? I said some insightful shit there too.

Great thing about "perceptions"...

[jimbudncl]

Even if you think your "eyes have been opened" (no pun intended), just give it time. You'll soon realize, again, how narrow minded you used to be.

Trust me, this will continue for(;;) until you realize the truth... you no longer fscking care ;)

Only then will you have enlightenment (or will you?!?!, sucka!)

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[interkin3tic]

My boyfriend and I dropped base last saturday morning, it was pretty warm.

Five senses is not enough

[w0mprat]

Brother Cavil: "I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[houstonbofh]

My boyfriend and I dropped base last saturday morning, it was pretty warm.

Really... Don't do everything they tell you in music...

"Let the base drop!"

A tactile compass?

[internerdj]

Hijacking the senses. I call writing as prior art if they ever try to patent the broad category...

Mega Dupe

[lessthan]

This article is just a summary of several stories from the last 3-4 years. It didn't even mention the really interesting applications for the tongue port device. They are developing a version to be used by the Navy to give divers a version of sonar. Link

Re:Mega Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wow, this thing is seriously the most cleverest of sensory extension devices i have ever seen.

No invasive surgery, just a simple tongue device, 100 "pixel" grid that sends impulses of image data from a head-mounted camera. (probably grey-scale)

This guy was a genius. Shame he died in 2006 though, damn cancer...
I really hope this does come to market by the end of the year, this would change the lives of so many people.
I wonder if they will be working on color at some point (or if they tried)

And it's not just that either, this could be a new avenue for research into other methods.
Sonar as you mentioned.
Imagine being able to walk around a dark room just via sound, solve a maze, man that would kick ass.

Deaf people could probably hear again, we have a fairly good understanding of how sound is interpreted by the brain too, if i remember correct.

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[Anonymous Coward]

My domestic partner and I BASE jumped last Saturday morning.

We were pretty high.

Nah, just varm

[Mathinker]

Let me guess where that is from... am I getting varm?

(I'm not even sure whether even you understand this reply, never mind the average Slashdotter. Anyway: Brunner more or less used that storyline twice, or even maybe three times with slight variations. In a different version, the color was called "varm", instead.)

Re:Nah, just varm

[FluffyWithTeeth]

No, GP's parent was most likely a reference to the colour of magic in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

Re:Nah, just varm

[sexconker]

Correct.

Re:Nah, just varm

[beav007]

Indeed. For the uneducated:

The colour of magic on the Discworld, also often called the eighth colour. Octarine is strongly indicative of magic and can only be seen by wizards and cats, who sometimes describe it as resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple. As in conventional human colour vision, colour opponency prevents the perception of reddish-greenish or yellowish-bluish colours; it would therefore be impossible to perceive a colour as "greenish-yellow purple"; if greenish-yellow and purple lights were shone together a shade of grey would result, with pigments the result would be brown. The normal human visual system works by the presence of cones and rods in the eye; the ability of wizards to see octarine is explained by the additional presence of octagons. The colour octarine appears as black or invisible to ordinary people; this leads to a common conception of the colour as the colour of an incandescent filament when viewed through black-light film, a fluorescent white or ultrablue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Discworld_concepts#Octarine

oblig

[gadabyte]

4 strength 4 stam leather belt AAAHHHHHHHHHH level 18 UHHHH UUUUUHHHHHH!!

Diamond via CVD would be my choice

[Mathinker]

If I had a big bankroll, I'd try coating with diamond using CVD, instead. Anyone know how thick a coating of diamond is necessary to get the appropriate level of chemical intertness?

My shark

[Anonymous Coward]

wants a frickin' laser rangefinder beam attached to its head.

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[Anonymous Coward]

All you base are belong to uaaarrrrrrggghh! Sorry sorry I couldn't resiaaarrrgggh!

Common sense

[argent]

If only they could develop artificial common sense.

Stool pigeon

[Anonymous Coward]

I always sleep with my head to North. I feel funny if I don't.. maybe it's a minor form of OCD but I have an excellent sense of direction even in the woods.

All I know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

how much I hate it when people use "subject" as the first part of their post.

Re:All I know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

how much I hate it when people use "subject" as the first part of their post.

Well, how much? I'm sorry but there seems to be something missing from the beginning of your post...

some women can see four primary colors

[peter303]

There was an article about the evolution of color vision in primates in a recent issues of Scientific American. Most mammals only see two primary colors while higher primates see three. The hypothesis is this helps distinguish plant foods better.

The primate third color gene is on the X-chromosome next to the 2nd color gene. The evolutionary mechanism is thought to be gene duplication with mutation of one copy. This mechanism very common. Some human females have been observed to have a fourth color gene which is similar to the recently evolved one.

Scientists have inserted the 3rd color gene into rats which normally just have two genes. These rats can be trained to can distinguish more subtle colors then. Apparently no extra genes are need to wire the brain to see extra colors.

Re:some women can see four primary colors

[Sp1n3rGy]

As a side note, this condition runs in families which also experience color blindness.

Some of the men get color blindness and some of the women get to see extra colors. Truly strange if you ask me.

matta

Re:some women can see four primary colors

[inject_hotmail.com]

I have read this as well. The article I read went on to say that this could be the reason why women are "so particular" about decorative colors, and why men "don't see the difference". It is likely that they can tell the different between cyan and turquoise, or forest green and dark green. Realistically, I think it's the difference between 24-bit and 32-bit color on our computers. There a difference, but it's subtle.

True true.

Re:some women can see four primary colors

[peter303]

> Realistically, I think it's the difference between 24-bit and 32-bit color on our computers. conventional 24-bit computer monitors only display half of the color space human eyes can see. Occasionally at SIGGRAPH I 'll see attempts at full-color displays. (e.g. some use six color guns) Images look more vivid, especially tropical scenes. You also see the computer color defects when you compare the best digitized color photographs on a monitor to the art itself. Its lacking.

body-sense: "one with the machine"

[peter303]

Probably everyone has felt a a tool or a sports equipment become a subconscious part of the body. For me its the keyboard and the steering wheel. The concept of "body image" is one of these extra senses. It is malleable. It can subconsciously incorporate extensions after hours of practice. Or it can it can still "feel itself" after a part of the body has been lost.

Quinn Norton wrote about doing that in Wired

[billstewart]

wrote about doing that in a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087">a 2006 Wired article. She talked about some of the previous researchers' work (who have written up stuff in bmezine), and had them implant magnets in her fingers as well.

Am I the only one who thinks that...

[Anonymous Coward]

the belt be useless? Unless you were lying down or the vibrators were jutting out of your belt (in which case you could only feel one), it would never work. It's like holding up a compass vertically. Never has worked and probably never will (unless someone makes a spherical compass). I don't see how you would have a sixth sense if you were walking upright.

Re:Am I the only one who thinks that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll assume you're watching this thread for an answer..

If you're wearing a belt, the idea is that it will vibrate depending on what direction your bellybutton/dick is facing. If you're wearing, lets say, 8 vibrators equidistant around your belt, then you could have the vibrator that is closest to the north pole (magnetic/polar norths skew notwithstanding) always vibrating. So, if you spin 360 clockwise starting with your bellybutton facing north, the vibrators will vibrate one after the other, starting with the one in front, then the ones on your left, then behind, then your right, then your front again. Imagine someone standing still, due north of you holding a vibrator to you whilst you spin. Of course, that would be a waste of power and heavy with all the vibrators (plus the electronics), so the setup would likely be the whole belt vibrating only if you're facing north. The downside to that is you wouldn't be able to confidently walk in a dead-straight line in any non-north direction (with the omni-directional way, you just walk so the vibration feels the same all the time, no matter where it's coming from). Perhaps you could split the difference, and go with 3 vibrators that vibrate with varying power, let the brain handle the 'triangulation' (AFAIK the brain is great at intuitive triangulation, see: crossing the street).

All your base are ... oh nevermind

[billstewart]

Somebody had to say it, and I'd already contributed one actually constructive post to the parent thread, so might as well...

Oblig Bender

[notarockstar1979]

I would give up my 8 other senses, even smision, for a sense of taste!

What about ESP?

[eyenot]

How amazing is it to have a vibrating belt (of all things) that helps one make up for an astounding lack of reliable directional sense, when there's apparently stuff out there that can help you make up for a far more commonplace lack of reliable ESP?

http://jointreconstudygroup.blogspot.com/ : "DARPA, Army fund Telepathic Research"

Direction finding belts

[Tired and Emotional]

I already have a direction finding belt for when I am cycling, though I am sure this would not work for competitive cyclists.

I soak the belt in water before I set off and then I can always find north by checking on which side the moss is growing.

Practical experiment

[serutan]

Many years ago when I was interested in psychic powers, I figured that if we really do have some kind of extrasensory perception it's probably our nervous system that's doing it, just in some unknown way, So I tried an experiment to make my nervous system a transducer that would convert unknown sense X to a sensation I could consciously feel.

I placed a glass of water on a table and practiced moving my hand slowly back and forth in front of it, imagining a tremendous pressure pushing against the palm of my hand as it passed the water. After a few minutes practice I began to actually feel it with my hand. Presumably this was the power of suggestion. I repeated for about 10 minutes with my eyes closed, knowing where the water was. I went through this routine 3 nights in a row, and by the third night the pressure feeling seemed very tangible and seemed to come unbidden.

So the next night I had a friend test me in a restaurant. She placed a glass of water on the table in front of me while I covered my ears so I wouldn't hear her movements. Then with my eyes closed I slowly swept my hand across in front of me until I felt the pressure sensation, and when I opened my eyes the water was in front of my hand.

At her request I tried to do it again, but this time I felt nothing. It turned out there was no glass there -- she had tried to fool me and was holding it under the table. We laughed about it and I never did any further experimenting. The results were probably just coincidence, but interesting.

Re:Practical experiment

[Firefalcon]

Fascinating. It would be interesting to talk to a blind person and see if they experience anything like this...

Just don't pick super hearing.

[BikeHelmet]

I already have extra senses(or extra strong; same thing), and I can tell you they're damn annoying.

I can locate electronics by the extremely annoying ringing/screeching sounds they emit. It was an utter pain finding a clock for beside my bed; I finally settled on one that runs off an AAA battery, and only needs a new battery every couple years. No audible noise coming from it.

I can locate TVs, monitors(CRTs, malfunctioning LCDs), DVD players, and some PSUs and Mobos by the sounds they make. Some devices still make sounds when "off", and others don't. Even some power bricks make annoying sounds. Some cordless phones do too; one actually gave me headaches, but most don't.

(it really is hit or miss, per device rather than per model; device quality really must vary!)

That's one of the reasons that my main computer is an Athlon XP 2400+; it doesn't make any annoying noises... though I suppose the 4000RPM fan is a tad loud. ;) But at least it isn't screeching at me!

Having a sense of direction would be neat, but let me assure you super hearing isn't what it's cracked up to be. It might be acceptable if I was surrounded by the outdoors, but surrounded by electronic gadgets... gah!

Interestingly, it appears to be genetic. My Uncle could hear that "Mosquito teen repellent" noise until 50-55 years old.

I don't like crowds, because I have trouble understanding what people are saying over the background noise. :/

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Brian Gordon]

Hearing exceptionally high frequencies and very quiet noises has nothing to do with picking voices out of a crowd.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Hucko]

Oh. Heh, I thought everyone could hear those. We are supposed to be unusual?

I don't like crowds, because I have trouble understanding what people are saying over the background noise. :/

I like crowds but have the same frustration you do. My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Tubal-Cain]

I can locate TVs, monitors(CRTs, malfunctioning LCDs), DVD players, and some PSUs and Mobos by the sounds they make. Some devices still make sounds when "off", and others don't. Even some power bricks make annoying sounds. Some cordless phones do too; one actually gave me headaches, but most don't.

Hearing the electronic whine is unusual? I've never heard cordless phones, I've heard all the rest at some point. And I've never known anyone to be incapable of hearing a CRT TV.

I don't like crowds, because I have trouble understanding what people are saying over the background noise. :/

Ditto, but I don't think that is related to hearing electronics. There's just too much background noise. It's much like trying to see something in the direction of the sun. Too much unimportant light.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Fnordulicious]

> My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.

You may a mild auditory processing disorder, if it's always been that way.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp

Another possibility, especially if this is increasing over time, is some kind of auditory neuropathy.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/neuropathy.asp

Or your wife could be right, and it's just a case of age-related hearing loss, also known as "presbycusis".
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/presbycusis.asp

If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.

Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[BikeHelmet]

Oh. Heh, I thought everyone could hear those. We are supposed to be unusual?

I don't know; clearly there's a couple people on slashdot with the same thing going on, but in the real world most people just look at me funny when I mention the noises coming from stuff.

I'm sure most young people can hear CRTs, but most adults I talk to don't. And they certainly can't hear noises from (some) cordless phones or clocks, so like everything there's got to be different strengths or levels.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Alarindris]

I don't know why you got modded funny, I can hear the same thing.

In high school, I'd amaze my friends 20 ft away from the classroom door saying "Cool, we're watching a video today."

Thing is, I'm also a musician, and I'm fairly sure it's not a 'note' I'm hearing. It's super high, but I couldn't sing the note octaves lower, which leads me to believe we've got some hairs in our ear just for super high frequencies, but they don't end up sounding specific, it's just a really really high pitched sound.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is parent modded funny?

I used to have the same hearing ability when I was a child. I lost it long ago, but I can definitly confirm it's real.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[smallfries]

I don't think everyone can do it, but it probably isn't that uncommon amongst the young. I could hear TVs and other electronics until my early 20s and then it faded away along with the rest of my hearing :) It does sound like your hearing is exceptionally acute though.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[relguj9]

I used to have to leave electronic stores after about 5 minutes when I was kid because of all of the noise, gave me horrible headaches.

There is a solution though! Listen to lots of loud music.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Limburgher]

I used to be able to hear this sort of thing, telling when a muted TV was on at school and in which classroom, but not since high school.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[fifedrum]

there was a story a while back about using an ultra high frequency buzz to annoy youths... most adults can't hear it, great way to keep kids off your lawn.

I can usually hear CRTs, ultrasonic sensors at traffic signals, and occasionally this weird high pitched whine that so far I haven't been able to associate with any device in the home. It just popps up, fades and stops, takes just a few seconds, and I've noticed the dog tilt his head giving me the impression he can hear it too.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[BikeHelmet]

You're talking about the Mosquito Teen Repellent, which I mentioned in my post.

Isn't it so annoying when some random object makes a sound for a second, then goes quiet? It makes it hard to pinpoint.

My Uncle was telling me about an annoying dripping sound at his old house. After days of trying to figure out where it was, he finally understood. The drips were coming from the septic tank outside, then echoing up through the pipes into his house!

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[BikeHelmet]

Oh good. More electronics, even closer to my ears!

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[relguj9]

Heh, I mean as in it will permanently dull your hearing, not just drown out the noise.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[DRACO-]

I agree, I hear all the echos. I cant understand people talking if there are too many echos in a room. I'll have to visually focus on them or ask to go somewhere with less echo in order to converse.

When I was a teen, I worked with the church operating the sound board. I could usually hear feedback before the adults could and start cutting and trimming eq to try to kill it without sacrificing the volume for the mix before it becomes a problem. Usually the hyper-cardioid mics over the choir needed adjusting because the minister of music would swing them out of position for larger choir groups and swing them back for smaller groups thus moving them between monitors fields.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Jake Griffin]

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/b278/

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[inject_hotmail.com]

From my now current understanding, not many people have such a sensitive sense of hearing...unfortunately (well, sometimes fortunately), I have the same or similar level as you. When I was young, I thought everyone could hear TVs (with the sound muted) just because they were on.

I too, can locate a powered-on television by its high-frequency sound alone. Very annoying when I'm trying to sleep. I can only describe the noise as high-pitch and high-tension. Somewhat like a feeling, more than a sound, because at that point it seems to become omnipresent, directionless. My cousin has a TV bought about 6 years ago, and it emits this high-pitch squeal even after it's turned off! I tried to get him to hear it, when I put my ear up to the top at the back of it, it's mind-numbingly loud. He can't hear it at all...nothing.

There have been times where I picked off a defective motherboard or power supply just by the noise it emitted. I was so happy when I switched too all LCD monitors at my work station (I had 3 19" monster CRTs).

I happen to have a function-generator (frequency generator) that I can hook up to a speaker. It can generate a frequency from 0.02Hz to 2MHz. When I generate a noise in the range of 15kHz, it seems to me that it sounds like the noise from a TV. It could be a bit higher...the upper response limit of the speaker is probably near that. I had my cousin (same one with the TV above) listen. As I approached 14kHz, he said that he couldn't hear it any longer.

Curious...I've always said I dislike crowds, and I've always been sensitive to sound...but never linked the two. I wonder if it's related, for me, as well.

Re:Just don't pick super hearing.

[Jay L]

which leads me to believe we've got some hairs in our ear just for super high frequencies, but they don't end up sounding specific

Yep - something like that. (This is all from memory, so it's probably wrong-but-close.)

The flyback transformer in a CRT is something like 15-16KHz. Most teenagers can hear that; in adulthood, we all lose the top end of our hearing range. Men lose it earlier than women, and people who've been exposed to loud OR continuous noise lose it earlier still. I can hear a CRT too, and I can hear when the background color changes from light to dark (e.g. a night scene cuts to a day scene.) As a child, I couldn't go into shoe stores until they'd turned off the alarm, because they all had ultrasonic alarms.

We have "hair cells" in our ears that vibrate sympathetically with the sounds we're hearing. We can't regrow them, though science is trying; once they're gone, they're gone. Different hair cells are tuned to different frequencies, and the ones for higher frequencies are more delicate and tend to break over time. And they work in groups; we have "critical bands", where a group of hair cells might be responsible for hearing 5000 - 5500Hz. If they're busy hearing one sound there, they can't hear another. This leads to our ability to compress MP3s by removing the sounds we wouldn't hear anyway; they're not masked just by volume, but by other closely-pitched sounds.

Pitch perception is indeed a different function from simple "I hear a sound". It's strongly affected by harmonics, which is why a steel drum always sounds out of tune, and pianos are "stretch tuned" so that an octave on the keyboard is slightly more than an octave in pitch (the frequency is just more than double). Google "Shepard tones" and "even-tempered scale" for more fun stuff there.

Because we rely on harmonics for pitch, it's harder to hear the pitch of a sine wave (no harmonics) than that of a more complex wave. This is why you might hate electronic "here's an A" tones; they're just sine waves. A more complex wave - say, a square wave - can be broken down into a series of sine waves, one at each harmonic, which sum up to a square wave.

Well, when you hear a super-high-pitched sound, like the TV, you're not hearing any harmonics. The first harmonic is already up at 30KHz, which is well beyond any human's hearing. So you can't tell what the true pitch is; you just know it's high.

There, now I know my tuition money was well-spent.

grammar police

[mevets]

Did you make a bet with the guy next to you, or did you offer him as your wager? Any chance you could offer the nearest gal instead?

Re:I Did Acid Saturday Night

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let the base drop!"

No, no, you've got it backwards. *You're* the one dropping. The enemy base is DOWN.

March 2007?

[Glove d'OJ]

Um, is it a dupe if it is more than *two* years old? This was in the first WIRED magazine I got, in March of 2007 (issue 15.04, per the URL given.)

I hate to be rant-y, but is this "News for nerds?" If you are going to point to WIRED articles, at least nab them from the latest article...

Or the reverse in my case.

[Gldm]

I found DMT did not produce any of those effects for me personally. Instead in my case it disabled my synaesthesia for about 15 minutes or so. This was extremely disconcerting at first but once I understood the effect a bit better (and realized I was still breathing despite not receiving the normal feedback from my lungs) it was more interesting than alarming.

While I'd been aware that I have multiple forms of synaesthesia, ranging from the common ones like grapheme-color, to more rare like lexical-gustatory, to just outright weird like numeric-topology, there were quite a few more subtle ones I hadn't taken into account. Some standouts in particular were synaesthesic mixes from channels like emotional state, internal sense (from organs), facial recognition, and temperature. It can be a hard thing to explain because to me that's just how the world is.

Before I saw a documentary on it in my 20s I thought everyone experienced things this way. Then I learned otherwise. After experiencing things without it for a little while, I feel kinda bad for everyone else. But on a positive note, I was able to understand how I was generating social anxiety in a feedback loop (emotional-visual overlay with complex things like facial recognition bias) and haven't needed anything for anxiety since the experience with DMT.

Re:Or the reverse in my case.

[F34nor]

You have to get more. Timothy Leary said, "Always go for the third hit." Or if you really want some good DMT, just spend 21 days in total darkness. Its a hardcore Taoist internal alchemy that causes the pineal to produce DMT. Or fast for a week and try ahayuasca it protected by US law for religious use now.

Sensebridge Cyborgs

[EricBoyd]

There is a group of people meeting on Sundays at Noisebridge in San Francisco, to work on devices like this compass belt, check us out here: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Cyborg_Group

Too

[Anonymous Coward]

bad, jerk.

What are you talking about?

[Atario]

He didn't use the word "subject" at all!

(Now I dare you to figure out whether I'm doing it too...)

would be interesting to see a study

[superwiz]

in how it effects cognition. it only stands to reason that as more input needs to be processed, less of the brain is dedicated to thinking. yes, i am aware that those happen in different parts of the brain, but the number of items occupying attention span doesn't grow. so if attention is occupied by extra senses, less attention is given to active pre-frontal processing. this would validate that common notion that people who are constantly occupied with processing communication devices are in fact less able to handle complicated ideas.

Permanence?

[Tubal-Cain]

Are there any senses we can train ourselves to use more permanently? i.e. I don't particularly want to wear a bulky belt for directional perception, and I really don't want a belt that needs batteries replaced every few days. Tricks like position of the sun work, but are not reliable 24-7.

Re:Permanence?

[Firefalcon]

Following Ley lines? :-p

Ah, well, senility had to set in sometime....

[Mathinker]

I did have a funny feeling something wasn't right, but I couldn't resist trying to make the absolutely most obscurely SF-geeky Slashdot comment, ever.

It's going to be hell for me now until

• I either remember the real name of the other eighth color by myself
• Someone replies to this post with the name
• I visit my parents' place and find an old copy of "The Stardroppers" (mine or my brother's)

"Octavine"? [wanders off murmurring to himself]

Apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

North Sensing watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe instead of a belt with vibrating weights you could use the band of a wrist watch. That would be awesome. It's effectiveness might not be as good though.

Only 6 senses? What happened to the others?

[rcasha2]

We have the ability to sense large changes in ambient pressure, as well as relative temperature. We have a sense of balance (yes, that's a sense too). Ok, so maybe we can't determine the exact atmospheric pressure in the same way we can see tiny subtle changes in colour (ie, frequency of visible light), but all these are still senses.

Who needs magnets?

[Firefalcon]

The odd thing is, I don't need magnets to navigate back to a point I started at. I couldn't easily tell you which way is north, but I can usually point in the direction of my car/hotel/etc from anywhere in the city provided I walked there (without any deliberate attempt to memorise landmarks or turns).

I was once 'lost' in Munich - lost in the sense of being able to point in exactly the direction of my car, just not being able to find streets that would take me that way. I came back via a completely different route, apart from the last 200 metres or so, but still knew exactly which way I needed to be heading...

i'm pretty sure

[KingBenny]

i can detect idiots in a 10 ft. radius, ... that's what too much ad&d will do to you i suppose

I'd like to be able to tune the ones I've got

[BoogieChile]

Being able to see outside this vapour-thin slice of the electormagnetic spectrum would be brilliant. Can I have eyes that can see from infrared* right up to UV, Gamma...X?

That would be cool...

*Anything below infra-red? I wanna see that too.

Additional uses for belt

[PhinMak]

How often have you been about to change lanes and then suddenly realized there was a car there? Your comment above talks about having personal "radar" but I think this could really help in a vehicle... The problem might be the shift from the use outside your vehicle where the belt would be "compass" and your brain would get used to it, to the different inputs you would get when the belt hooks up (bluetooth?) to the additional sensors attached to the exterior of the car (plane?)... Could you somehow make the vibration/pulses different from the "compass" type so you could tell the difference? I drive a Mini and one of the many things I like about it is the 360 degree visability I get. (No blind spots at all!) I looked at a 350z, but like all coupes, those flying butresses of a C-pillar are huge, thick and make me very nervous. Also being in a Mini, I feel like i have to be much more in-tune with my surroundings, since I'm that much smaller than the ginormous Tahoe's I'm always passing... (Current inputs I have while driving beyond typical driving: [1]nav screen [2] Headset w/Trapster speedtrap warnings [3] Valentine1 radar detector. I take "situational awareness" to the next level. I'd be up for hearing additional ideas from other /.ers...)

Not just 5 senses

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that we only have 5 (or 6) "senses" is a vast over-simplification they taught in gradeschool. Humans have many more "sense" than that but as with many things, the version given to us as kids sticks around.