Hacking Our Five Senses 232
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.'"
I am not so sure I would want (Score:3, Funny)
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Down front? Yeah, that's the stylus. It improves productivity by enticing at least 50% of the workforce to use it often and requires no additional training. The developers thought of outfitting it with a laser, but were afraid of it blinding attendants during so-called money shots.
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Driver crash! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am not so sure I would want (Score:5, Interesting)
A guy wore it for a year, iirc, and his body adapted to the new "sense" to such a degree that he had a little freak out break down when he removed it, and now walks around with a handheld gps all the time, to try and make up for the "sense" of direction he lost. He says he developed a kind of spacial sense, which gave him a firm sense of spacial orientation...he stopped getting lost...and just sort of knew little directional tidbits like "my house is in that direction" etc.
One of the most interesting things about the articles, is the thread that all our senses are capable of processing more data than we give them credit for...Another article talked about a limited visual sense that interfaced through the tongue, and worked almost without any training at all.
It's some cool stuff, and it definitely opens up some possibility for some interesting sensory "prosthesis" to give information that isn't processed by our natural senses.
Re:I am not so sure I would want (Score:5, Interesting)
Your body adapts fast to new supplimentary input (Nicotene for example) and does not want to give it up after it has gone.
I strongly reading his research papers for anyne interested in this technology and subject.
Re:I am not so sure I would want (Score:4, Interesting)
They did FMRI scans of people in various situations, some addicts, some not.
What they showed was actual differences in their brain activity in various centers... changes that happened slowly over time. Use the drug over and over, and your brain adapts to that input, it changes in response to it.
Of course this is assumed to be an unequivicolly bad thing, though, I am not sure we really can put a value judgement on it... its one of those "it is what it is" things, we still don't know quite what to make of it... its still very very high level.
Of course, we should expect this with all things. I was born epileptic. I spent the first half of my life (up to this point) on anti-seizure drugs like tegratol. Look at what tegratol does, imagine a brain being exposed to it on a daily basis during its most formative years.... wow.
There has been only very very limited study into the area. I found a few articles in some recent searches on the subject. Some evidence that kids who grow up on these meds have lower incidence of marriage, lower overall achievement, etc. Overall, from my interactions with others, I have come to realise... my brain works differently in ways that actually makes it really hard to relate to alot of people in some ways.
How much of that is genetics? how much of that is upbringing? How much of that is changes made over years by exposure to brain fucntion altering drugs? How much of my formative experiences were colored or directly influenced?
Don't get me wrong... I am not trying to make a value judgement here, or say "hey look, they broke me" just that, more fascination with how the brain works and how changeable it really is. I would love to have such a "space belt". I wonder wat FMRIs of people who wore one for a year or two would differ from others.
This stuff just fascinates me.
-Steve
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I went to GT, and even took a class of his. You could always see him walking around with all kinds of things attached to him. Some of his PhD students are the same way, too. Although, the continuous clicking and buzzing does get to you after a while.
Both Starner and Mann have done some very pioneering work in this area.
Although, to be fair, Mann has done significantly more and has been at this a lot longer. IIRC, he was once stopped at an American airport for carrying this stuff. They refuse
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It seems, though, that they are looking for interfaces that bypass the cogintive functions and feed data directly to what we'd call feeling. Where a compass will only show you which way is north if you look at and find where the needle is pointing, the belt gives a constant throb in the nortern direction that does not require conscious thought.
There was a story a while back about people getting magnets (those super-strong rare earth ones) embedded under their finger tips. It gave them a
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I've noticed that since I moved to the Denver area, I almost never get lost. You never *think* about the fact that there are these great big mountains constantly visible to the west. But I get this spooky feeling if I go somewhere I haven't been before on a rare low-visibility day. Your brain just accepts that you should always know which you're facing, and be able to roughly triangulate off a couple notable peaks.
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There was some study a few years ago, that found out people have a small portion of their brain that is sensitive to magnetic fields, similar to what they found in homing pigeons.
The human brain (Score:5, Informative)
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Been doing this almost forever (Score:2)
Metal detector: detects metals and makes sound that you can hear.
Volt meter/oscilloscope: Measures voltage and makes it available to the brain via eyes.
Clock: Measures time and presents it to the eyes or ears...
Related (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Related (Score:4, Interesting)
It seemed like a really interesting concept. Similar to how your sense of direction works by using magnetic north.
This also reminds me of an element of this book I just read (Rant by Chuck Palahniuk). In the future, people have ports that enable them to plug in and experience a recorded neural episode. In the story, you could get a large-breasted girl high on heroin and sit her in a train watching the scenery go by, the whole time playing with herself and output that to a new recording that you could rent and experience yourself without the dangers of actually doing heroin.
It was quite an amazing concept.
Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, heroin works because it causes certain chemicals inside the brain to change. If you don't release those chemicals, it's not going to feel the same. So a completely honest recording of a heroin trip would necessarily have to produce the same physiological response in your synapses as the real thing.
I suspect, that if such a technology were available, that "recordings" of people doing drugs would quickly become just as illicit as the drugs themselves, because they'd be just as addictive. (Although, it's not as though the drug laws in the U.S. have ever had any real correlation to harm, so it might matter more who was making money by selling said recordings and how many Senators they owned.) There are quite a few novels that I've read where the idea of addictive neuro-stimulus was discussed; off the top of my head I think it comes up in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
Re:Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thin (Score:2)
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The book goes for pages and pages explaining the process. I believe there's an entire chapt
Re:Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thin (Score:2)
Re:Wouldn't that be just as 'bad' as the real thin (Score:2)
Why not just record the memories of a someone going through 5 year rehab and then upload them after the experience? Problem solved.
Or better yet, just turn off the ability for your brain to desire for sens
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I don't have the link immediately available, but that story ended badly. His body ended up rejecting the magnet implants and they ended up breaking up in his fingers, the pictures
Ouch. (Score:2)
While that sucks for him, I don't think it totally invalidates the experiment's results though, just perhaps part of the methodology. There are definitely substances that the human body doesn't seem to reject (titanium, some ceramics, some types of stainless steel, some plastics, etc.) and are already used in medical applications. Perhaps if the magnets had been coated in something nonferrous but inert, the rejection wouldn't have happened. (Maybe ceramic capsules?)
I also wonder if you could do somethi
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mmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:mmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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See taste (Score:5, Interesting)
-nB
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Remember the experiment? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why yes! (Score:3, Funny)
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If I recall correctly, it turned out that it took longer for the brain to switch back than it did to switch over in the first place.
Experiments in animals and humans (Score:2)
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Re:Remember the experiment? (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
B0Rg Country (Score:2, Funny)
Not very new... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's something that's been done for a long time... a radio transfers radio waves into something that we can hear. A clock transfers the current time to something we can see. A compass also shows us direction in a way that we can see. That's what instruments do. This would be better news if it talked about how the scientists are putting it directly into our brains, as opposed to how that's NOT what they're doing; they've been doing this stuff for many thousands of years already.
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I've lived in and learned my way around several metropolitan areas. I acquired a far better geographic understanding, far faster, in the Denver area than any of the others. I think this is because anywhere in the Denver area, whether you are thinking about it or not, you are aware of your position relative to the same l
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Perhaps instead of a pocket compass, a better comparison would be a compass on your car's dashboard during a long drive. Although you're not looking at it the whole time, you can be subconsciously aware of the data it presents just as you can sort of know when you're low on gas without deliberately checking the gauge
Not very old, either... (Score:2)
I suppose the difference between the stuff the article talks about and your "radio" example is in the personalization - there's a difference between a radio in the room and a radio only you can hear.
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Yes, we're aware that when the article talks about things we've done in the past, that they're not new. Please don't complain about the last few sent
Ghost in the Shell/Anime overlords (Score:2)
Hive mind (Score:2)
wired (Score:2, Interesting)
But these changes through experience are fairly
Eek (Score:3, Funny)
Get ready for plug-and-pray, mark 2..
Lecture on Feelspace (Score:3, Informative)
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When the earth's magnetic field polarity finally swaps, these folks are going to be SO annoyed.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4985 [newscientist.com]
For the rest of us, it's a good thing that our GPS receiver belts will still point north.
*grin*
There's less here than meets the eye (Score:3, Interesting)
This sort of sensory augmentation is hardly a new idea.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
It seems to be increasingly evident that a cell phone that makes no use of ones' hands nevertheless consumes attention that would otherwise be allocated to driving, and I suspect this is true of every other input modality.
Attentionis a limited resource. You might as well present the information on an ordinary viewing screen that occupies part of the field of view. However you present it, you can't add more information without blocking your "view" of information you'd otherwise be processing.
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Right, cause I know I have a hard time interpreting both color and depth with my eyes. C'mon, you really think my brain couldn't handle infrared as well?
We do this kind of thing every day, but we take it for granted because we have always done it. You watch TV, listen to the news, and make sure your kid isn't choking on his Cheerios all at the same time. You use transparency on your PC to watch two windows at once. I can tell you what was on NPR last night, and I'm pretty sure I didn't run over any lit
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Definitely agreed. For that matter, it's the same sort of plasticity that allows someone who looks at (film) negatives for long enough, to be able
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I'm not sure I entirely agree. As has already been noted above, the brain is highly adaptable. Remember when you were learning how to drive? It took all of your concentration just to keep the car moving straight down the road. Later, you learned to keep your speed within 5mph (kph, if you prefer) while keeping the car going straight down the road. Then, you started playing music in the car, talking to passengers, using the cell phone, etc. I suspect the reason is becau
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Just plug it in (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike the Neuromancer fantasy, you can't just jack in, but if implanted early enough, you could adapt to the additional sensory input.
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According to TFA, you can indeed just jack in. It was about external devices rather than surgical implants, but that doesn't change the fundamental mechanism. Adults can start using these and incorporate the additional sensory information, in some cases almost immediately, because adult brains are still plastic, just not as much as child brains. I'm not expecting much con
Interesting topic, badly written. (Score:5, Informative)
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 Senses (Score:2)
The way I've always thought of it was that there were far more than five senses -- many of which fell under the "exteroceptive" senses:
all of which report about things outside one's body. There are also "forgotten" internal (introceptive) senses:
Hardware discounts? (Score:2, Funny)
You just need to sign up for a two year contract. But it will be .45/min if you go over your listening plan, and you don't even want to think about the roaming charges for hearing stuff you shouldn't.
Can you hear me now?
Magnetic touch (Score:2)
sure be nice to see electric fields (Score:2)
I tried tagging the story
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What I've ended up doing is: my dad was an electrical engineer, and one of the instruments he designed was an extremely sensitive, precision amplifier. If I hook the output of it to a speaker, I can take the input and wave it near a wall and *hear* the buzz of the live wires.
But I think it'd be -- or could be -- a visually spectacular sight to be able to perceive EM fields, because I imagine them being like auroras or the colors you see in plasma etch chambers. It
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EM is directional as well as spatial. It would have to look like continuously flowing fluid so that you could see the magnitude and direction at every point in space. Color might give an indication of magnitude, but without the direction it would be confusing and somewhat us
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That's nothing. (Score:2)
Here's a primitive example in use now... (Score:2)
Here is a device that allows the blind to "see" by imprinting images onto the tongue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0 [youtube.com]
Kinda neat. Extremely low-resolution. I probably first found that link on Slashdot, for all I know....
It's Called A "Wife" (Score:5, Funny)
Wha? (Score:2)
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.
Oh, wait, you mean, like with a screen, keyboard, and mouse? Not to belittle future improvements to the man-machine interface, but there's a reason why the video display/keyboard/mouse combination has been around so long: it works well with a minimum amount of training. That's not to say that using other senses won't enhance our computing experience (the belt mentioned in TFA is pretty cool), but I think KVM is a very flexible way of accomplishing this already.
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And if you think using a keyboard/mouse/monitor requires a "minimum amount of training" you have never tried to get someone who thinks the mouse looks like a foot pedal, who weilds a white out pen to fix the mistakes on the screen...
Imagine you had a sense that nobody else had (Score:5, Interesting)
It turns out there are other senses, other than the five Aristotelean ones. Proprioception, for one: the awareness of body positioning. People who have proprioceptive disorders because of things like brain damage don't really have convenient and commonly understood language to describe their impairment to other people, other than to say they have brain damage that makes them clumsy.
But language or not, at least people share the sense of proprioception, so there are shared experiences that could form the basis for communication. But imagine you had some ability most other people didn't have, say the ability to detect electric current or to feel when somebody was observing you. I'm not sure you would necessarily even be aware when the sense was operating, other than feeling a kind of "intuition".
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The story was about a young girl who had normal sight and vision, and was
Sense of Smell and the cold (Score:2)
Re:Sense of Smell and the cold (Score:4, Interesting)
It's very strange you mention this. I have the same ability, which most people I tell about it claim is 'in my head'.
The strangest part, in a botched medical procedure when I was 3 years old, I fully lost my sense of smell (Called 'anosmia'.)
Yet to this day, about 12-18 hrs before I notice the first symptoms of a cold or flu, I too can smell this strange odor and know to associate it with having caught a cold.
Unfortunatly due to not having a sense of smell, I've never been able to compare the cold catching smell with any other odor, but both due to the fact my smell receptors are physically damaged, and no one else i've mentioned this to knows what i'm talking about (plus you are the first person i've ever heard describe also having it), I tend to think either most people don't have this sense, or if they do it's percieved on such a low level that it's not realized it's even a sense or 'smell' and gets processed in another way by the brain.
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Not to mention our sense of down. The accelerometers in our inner ears give us that sense.
My brother is a professor, and he
I think we solved this one a long time ago. (Score:2)
Last time I checked humans had made instruments to detect and track information of all sorts. In order to turn the things detected into something that could be detect by human senses we invented an interface. They are called displays and take many forms. We even invented
The human brain is already wired to accept... (Score:2)
Gotcha. Here's some ways to change new sensory data into something we're already wired to accept:
Air Pressure: Barometer (Sight)
Air Pressure: iPod (Sound)
Altitude: Altimiter (Sight)
Magnetic Field: Compass (Sight)
Proximity to solid objects: Radar (Sight, Sound)
Detection of radiation: Geiger Counter (Si
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"Five" senses? (Score:3, Insightful)
We have that already! (Score:2)
Converting electromagnetic fields to sight? We have that already, it's called a TV!
One direction != position (Score:2)
I wonder if his feeling about where his hometown was, was really so accurate, or if it was just a 'false feeling'.
Seeing with Sound (Score:2)
Check out this project. It lets the vision impaired "see" using a set of headphones, a pc (laptop rig) and web cam (head mounted). Check out some of the video demos.. I was able to quickly pick out the windows and doors on the buildings the user was walking past.
I am not vision impaired, and I think using this would probably give me a massive headache, but I could get used to it if it was my only option.
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Seriously, not such a bad idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, right now there are a lot of cars with sonar sensors to aid in back-in parking. Rather than turning that into audible output that requires a lot of processing to make sense of ("three feet
Many cars also have inflatable air bladders located in the back of the driver's seat, for lumbar s
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That's the "glass half empty." (Score:3, Insightful)
However, having been once nearly driven over by a garbage truck whose operator didn't bother to use the rear-facing camera that was provided so that he could see what's in back of him, I think there's definitely a market for systems that deliver information in a more subtle manner, if that means that people pay more attention to the information that's provided.
It's not just "bad drivers" that this sort of thing helps. If you h
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Actually, I think you've got something there. Although people likely won't adopt bulky extra-sensory gadgets to wear around all the time, I bet they could be installed in vehicles with more success.
Your reverse car sensor could be translated to a row of buzzers against the back or under a thigh. The seatbelt could have that direction-sense built into it.
I think an interesting experiment would be to find out whether someone could adapt t
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Now there's an idea. If the kind of synesthesia we get from PS2 controllers is any indication of how well this can work, I see no reason why a "rumble seat" couldn't be developed for left-right-rear proximity detection. Properly executed, it would make driving in swift freeway traffic a lot safer*, let alone what it could do for parking.
(*ever calcul