Headband Gives Wearer "Sixth-Sense"

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports on a headband developed at the University of Tokyo that allows the wearer to feel their surroundings at a distance — as if they had cats whiskers. Infrared sensors positioned around the headband vibrate to signal when and where an object is close. There are also a few great videos of people using it to dodge stuff while blindfolded."

Already have that

[Anonymous Coward]

A sixth sense, that is. It's called the sense of balance. Why is this never included in the senses list?

Re:Augmentation of senses

[LWATCDR]

Well since it is at head level I don't know how effective it would be for a blind person. I can see it being put into things like hard hats. Anything that can help avoid a head injury is a good thing.

Well, almost good enough

[orclevegam]

Someone call me when they actually manage to give someone new senses, instead of overlaying a new sense on top of an existing one. It's all well and good to do something like this as an experiment, but it's just a stepping stone. The real progress will come when they can do a direct neural hookup without having to come up with some way of translating incoming data into some format that can be expressed using an existing sense.

Don't need a headband for this.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If your hearing in both ears is good and the environment isn't too noisy, you don't need a headband full of electronics and sensors for this.

With practice you can "image" enough of your environment to get around just from echoes of your own body's sounds or other ambient noises of suitable waveshape. (This is how you get the "closing in" feeling in tight spaces.)

There are reports of a totally blind kid using this effect to ride a bicycle and avoid obstacles. (He made clicking sounds with his mouth to provide a controlled, sharp (low-distance-error) sound, effectively emulating one mode of a bat's sonar.)

"Chirps" (single tones rapidly "swept" at a constant change of frequency per unit time) are potentially far better for imaging and ranging than "clicks" (impulses or short sound bursts that approximate them). But it's not clear that the human brain and vocal system has the necessary structures for generating and processing them correctly.

= = = =

Of course the headband might be much more effective than training up your own sound-generating and sensory systems - which (unlike a bat's or a cetacean's) aren't optimized for this service.

And more

[spun]

Touch isn't one sense. Temperature, surface detail, and pressure are separate parts of it. Besides balance, there's also proprioception, which lets you know where your body parts are. Then there's the sense of thoughtforms, the ability to know one's own thoughts and feelings, and the sense of self, which is the only thing that lets us do anything useful with our mental models of the world we build out of all the other senses by relating the model of the world to the model of the individual.

You may be surprised to learn there are more than four tastes, too. Besides the sour, salty, sweet, and bitter we're all familiar with, there's a fifth type of taste bud that detects glutamate, a flavor known as'umami' [wikipedia.org] and characterized as 'savory' or 'meaty.'

Re:Augmentation of senses

[Raindance]

It's amazing that even "tacked-on", purely mechanical senses such as this headband, or this direction-sensing belt [wired.com] will actually re-wire one's brain (more in the linked article). It may be a mechanical hack, but to your brain, it functions as a sixth sense.

Wild. :)

Re:Augmentation of senses

[dimeglio]

Actually, it would be possible, according to TFA, to mount these sensors on the outside of a vehicle. So yes, it would help with the curb. Now imagine adding this to an aircraft, it would make piloting much more intuitive as you could potentially feel the airflow.

Re:Augmentation of senses

[hotdiggitydawg]

Aha... but it was invented by the Japanese... and I know why: Takeshi's Castle