Hacking Our Five Senses

zdude255 writes "Wired is running an article exploring several studies of giving the human brain 'new input devices.' From seeing with your sense of touch to entirely new senses such as sensing direction intuitively, the human brain seems to be capable of interpreting and using new data on the fly. This offers many applications from pilots being able to sense the plane's orientation to the potential recovery of patients with blindness or ear damage. (which helps balance).'It turns out that the tricky bit isn't the sensing. The world is full of gadgets that detect things humans cannot. The hard part is processing the input. Neuroscientists don't know enough about how the brain interprets data. The science of plugging things directly into the brain -- artificial retinas or cochlear implants -- remains primitive. So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.'"

Re:mmmmm

[CastrTroy]

Are you trying to be funny, or are you talking about Synesthesia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Not very new...

[Rob T Firefly]

Agreed. The only novelty about the methods in TFA seems to be that they are translating data to tactile rather than visual information, but when it all comes down to it this doesn't seem much more "hacking the five senses" than a pocket compass translating physical orientation into visual data.

Lecture on Feelspace

[teslar]

One of the things mentioned in TFA is König's feelSpace belt, a belt which gives you information about which direction North is. A lecture he gave about it at the Neuro IT summer school in 2005 is actually available here [neuro-it.net]. It's from two years ago, granted, but still reasonably interesting.

Re:Remember the experiment?

[symes]

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

Re:Remember the experiment?

[mykdavies]

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

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

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

The link has references to the source material.

Just plug it in

[blamanj]

Recent experiments that have given mice new color-sensing ability [scienceblogs.com] seems to imply that if you can just get the input into the brain, the brain will try and incorporate it. Obviously, this works best when the brain is still "plastic", when the organism is young. I wonder if you wired an infrared camera (or similar) to a newborn that by the time they were a couple of years old, they'd be making full use of the additional information.

Unlike the Neuromancer fantasy, you can't just jack in, but if implanted early enough, you could adapt to the additional sensory input.

Interesting topic, badly written.

[alexhs]

First, this is not exactly new. For example, I've read years ago about an equipment with a camera and a dot-matrix that could be put on the finger of a blind person, so that person could see in a low-resolution.

What's interesting is that it can also apply to add sense we might not have in the first place.

Now the writer doesn't understand much about senses :(
There are more than five, and he even cites internal ear. The balance sense is a full sense, while proprioception is a mix of senses : mainly balance sense, touch (wind orientation changing, heat from the sun), vision (even eyes closed you might be able to see a little light from the sun), sources of sound rotating...

Also, other classic senses are also mixes :

Touch is composed from (at least) pression sensing, heat sensing.
Taste is all what composes touch (feeling of the texture of what you eat, heat) plus tongue receptors,
plus flavours receptors, closely related to smell.

Pain is a separated sense, it's a stress from cell that then emit strong signals in nerves and can originate from internal organs.

The human brain

[vivin]

The human brain is pretty plastic. It can adapt to a lot of new conditions. In patients who are recently blind, or even in people who have been blindfolded for a while, the sense of touch and sound is amplified. Areas of the brain that were used for vision, are now used to interpret sound and touch. PET shows which parts of the brain are active. Check out Phantoms in the Brain [amazon.com] and . [amazon.com]

Re:sure be nice to see electric fields

[maxwell demon]

You already can see electric fields. Provided they oscillate at 400 to 750 THz.