š The Future Sense
Neuroscientists say that when it comes to our senses, thereās more than meets the eye. In a world āqualia,ā we are resurrecting lost senses while discovering new ones.
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āNot only do each of us perceive the world differently to anyone else thatās alive, but to anyone else thatās ever lived.ā āBiologist Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses [2023], speaking on The Spectator podcast.
Hello, weāre Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. No tunnel vision present today. Whether āhearingā through touch or conjuring scent to prevent losing memory, scientists of senses such as sight and sound are using technology to augment, add to, and even swap our senses.
The way I see it ā¦
Submerged in studies of the senses, neuroscientist David Eagleman had a hunch. The author and occasional scientific advisor for HBOās Westworld, thinks that while humans haven't evolved to have certain senses ā say, magnetoreception or night vision - doesnāt mean they canāt. āThe interest in my lab for a long time has been what if we could actually push information into the brain via an unusual sensory channel and repair lost senses or build new ones?ā Eagleman, who teaches courses on brain plasticity at Stanford University, tells CNNās Chasing Life. āSo we might actually be able to build new qualia and understand what that is like.ā
In philosophy of mind, āqualiaā is the subjective experience of a sense. āFor example, when a neuroscientist looks at vision, it's all this activity in cells. And yet vision doesn't feel that way to you. It feels like, oh, look at that lovely orange and red sunset or, you know, the taste of cinnamon on your mouth or the smell of a campfire or something. These are qualia. It's your subjective experience, even though physically you just see spikes running around in the brain. And so the question is, could we have a new kind of qualia that is not something that we're used to getting through our eyes or ears or nose or mouth, things like that. In the same way that I can't imagine a new color, could I imagine or come to develop new qualia?ā
Sensing something more?
Think of dinosaurs. They had feathers to keep them warm long before using them to fly, the late theoretical physicist John Wheeler, once told ALICE in a magical 2002 interview. āDo we have something, some faculty that we havenāt put to use the way the dinosaurs had put to use these feathers of theirs until later?ā he asked. āItās fantastic that evolution should have ended up with us. What other kind of creature could it have been?ā
Eagleman concurs. āWhat is the brain capable of in terms of bringing in new senses and what could it do? Where could humans go? There's a sense in which this is the trajectory our species has been on from the beginning, which is, "Hey, let's build the Industrial Revolution and let's build the Internet and let's, you know, be tied into the entirety of humankind's knowledge with a rectangle in my pocket and so on," you know, we're constantly ratcheting things up,ā he tells CNN. āAnd now I think this is the next step is understanding how do you want to experience the universe around you and what would it be like to tap into these other signals that are surrounding you but are invisible to you?ā
Oh, make it make sense!
āMy own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery ā always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud.ā ā Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Ethel Smyth, 1932.
Biologist Ashley Ward says the field of the senses complex and ever changing. āWe can detect gravitational waves in space, we can do all kinds of amazing things in the realm of the sciences but we donāt know how our sense of smell works,ā Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses [2023] tells The Spectator podcast.
āThereās no definitive answer for that. The same is true to a large extent about our sense of taste, indeed about any of our senses. We donāt have a full understanding of how basic sensations are translated into our perceptions, and that is going to be a fascinating challenge for the years going forward as we move from sensation to perception, and then ultimately, one hopes we get from perception to consciousness, the real lodestar at the centre of our existence.āĀ So if consciousness, for now, is the part we canāt quite grasp, then human senses are certainly more tangible. Or are they?
We donāt passively take in the world around us; instead our mind is constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see,ā writes cognitive scientist and philosopher Andy Clark in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality [2023]. āThis even applies to our bodies, as the way we experience pain, and other states, is shaped by our expectations, and this has broader implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions from PTSD to schizophrenia to medically unexplained symptoms.ā
In an article titled, āThe Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark,ā The New Yorker says āhe dreams of a future in which his refrigerator will order milk, his shirt will monitor his mood and heart rate, and some kind of neurophone connected to his cochlear nerve and a microphone implanted in his jaw will make calling people as easy as saying hello.ā From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, cognitive scientist and philosopher Andy Clark praises the power of our predictive brain to sculpt our experience. Ā
What are the haptics? Whatās the buzz?
Eagleman is the co-founder of Neosensory, a Cali-tech company building non-invasive brain-machine interfaces to create new senses. āAbout a decade ago, I got really interested in whether we can create new senses,ā he told New Scientist in 2021. āYou have your eyes, ears and nose, but when you look across the animal kingdom, you find animals with detectors that can pick up on things like magnetic fields, electrical fields or ultraviolet light. It just depends what sensors they have. I began to understand our sense organs as āplug and playā detectors. Nature doesnāt have to redesign the brain every time she makes a new detector. Instead, she tinkers with different ways of sensing energy. That opens up the idea of creating new kinds of detectors to plug in.ā
First, they designed the VEST (Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer) a sensory augmentation wearable made up of 32 vibrating motors. The VEST could translate any kind of real-time data into patterns of vibration on the skinā and even featured in an episode of Westworld. Then they shrank it, to make Buzz, a Fitbit-style wristband that captures sound and turns it into patterns of vibration on the skin. The device helps people with hearing impairments āhearā by feeling vibrations. These follow the nerves up to the brain, which reaches an understanding of it.
Asked if he could go further, Eagleman responds: āYes. I live in Silicon Valley and everything here is about hardware and software. But whatās happening in the brain suggests a completely different approach to building technologyācall it live-ware. So Iām interested in building systems that arenāt just software but physically reconfigure themselves based on experiences like the brain does. In this way, it would become fast and efficient at the tasks that it does a lot. I feel like we are at the foot of the mountain looking up at it. At the moment, we have no idea how to build this kind of machinery. But Iām excited to see what will happen in the next few decades.ā
Ready for your upgrade?
Science is discovering that we have more than 53 senses in which we experience the worldāand what we individually know of as āreality.ā Physiologically, there are electrical signals generated by our sensory cells and afferent nerve fibers that inform our sensory mechanisms. And it turns out that our cells can senseāthey can smell, taste, hear and feel/touch. We generally understand olfactory receptors to be located in the nose and to play the central role in our sense of smell, however, these receptors are also found in skin cells and can regulate cell functions. One in particular, OR2AT4, has been associated with mitigating keratinocyte proliferĀation, migration and regeneration. We also have taste receptors sprinkled around the body in places such as the liver and the brain.
What constitutes a sense is a still a matter of some debate. As Bruce Durie wrote in his article āSenses Special: Doors of Perceptionā for New Scientist, āWhen we talk of senses, what we really mean are feelings or perceptions.ā The Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness, recognizes that āthere is no known physical principle that can translate electrical activity in the brain or in a computer into sensations or feelings.ā The foundation supports research to advance our understanding of consciousness under the assumption that it is an irreducible property of nature. But more to come on this, as ALICE visits with Federico Faggin, Italian physicist, engineer, inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, who talks more about the new science of consciousness, qualia (the inner reality of sensations and feelings) and future senses in our next podcast. Stay tuned.
What else we are wanderingā¦
How little our senses tell us, so that we are constantly obliged to use apparatuses in order to analyze things.ā19th-century French physiologist Ćtienne-Jules Marey
š Sense sleuthing
The man behind the birth of big data and statistics used from Apple to Google is Gustav Fechner, a German medical doctor, philosopher and physicist, who went blind overnight in 1840. āLittle did the scientist know, however, that his dire situation would eventually result in something remarkable,ā writes Chris Salter in Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our everyday Life [MIT Press, 2022]. āA startling revelation that would forever change our understanding of the human senses and how they would come to interact with machines.ā
Fechner took intensive short-term exposure to bright light everyday, quickly closing his eyes before it caused pain. āOne day, he removed the thick bandages covering his eyes,ā writes Salter, Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. āThe light spilled in. As he glanced into his garden, the scientist experienced a miraculous sight. He saw the flowers āglowing.ā They seemed to speak to him. In this ecstatic moment, Fechner came to an astonishing realization ā plants must also have souls.ā
Fast-forward 180 years, says Salter. āDozens of jobs in new professions with strange sounding titles appear: vision engineer, applied perception scientist, visual experience researcher, color scientist, and neural interface engineer.ā Fechner founded all of this when he invented āpsychophysicsāĀ ā a ātheory of the relations between body and mindā that aimed to establish a measurable connection between two spheres that had long remained separate: the material, physical universe and the mental, psychological one. āIn Fechnerās formulation, psychophysics would be an āexact science, like physicsā and ārest on experience and the mathematical connection of those empirical facts that demand a measure of what is experienced.ā He asserted, in other words, that we can measure and calculate how we sense the world using mathematics, forever changing how we view sensing and perception in relationship to man-made machines.ā
š Letās touch on touch
Our body has a languageāone that includes the sense of touch, which is unique. In fact, people have a "touch language". A group of researchers from USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Stanford explored if this "touch language" can be sensed remotely. They wanted to see if two companions (platonic or romantic), could communicate and express care and emotion remotely. The baseline for their study found that people perceive a partner's true intentions through in-person touch an estimated 57 percent of the time. They found that when interacting with a device that simulated human touch, respondents were able to discern the touch's intention 45 percent of the time.Ā
The challenge for the researchers was to create an algorithm that can be flexible enough to incorporate the many dimensions of touch. Overall, 661 touch gestures were recorded. About 45 percent of the time, individuals wearing the armband were able to understand the intended emotion communicated via remote touch. The study proves that the social meaning and expression conveyed through in-person touch can be communicated remotely.
š§ Not feeling it
The ātouch starvationā people experienced during the coronavirus pandemic turns out to be a real thing, says biologist Ashley Ward. Humans have two different types of touch that are neurologically different. āWe have very fast, high-speed kind of internet cables in our bodies that register all sorts of important touch to our brains and thatās what weāve become accustomed to think of when we think of touch, we register when we stub our toe or brush against a chair,ā Ward tells The Spectator. āBut there is another kind of touch, although relative to the high-speed nervous apparatus which translates the previously described form of touch to our brains, these kind of fibers operate like little country back roads and travel much more slowly to the brain.ā And yet there are far, far more of them and they potentially are more important. āThese are fibers which respond to us being touched by another person, we may be caressed in a slow, gentle and loving way and its incredibly important. It really opens up our brains to all kinds of reward and pleasure in a way that we really hadnāt appreciatedāor snickered at it, and thought of it as not scientifically importantāand yet recent research has suggested just how important these fibers are to our well being.ā
š§ I feel you
There are a wave of new Long Distance Touch Bracelets that mimic the sense of touch between two people virtually and connected to a mobile applicationĀ via Bluetooth. When one person touches their bracelet, the application triggers the other bracelet to vibrate and light up or squeeze, in the case of theĀ Hey Bracelet.
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