| Wheii.com | Understand Change > Be in the Know

Main menu

SITE FEED

RSS

ARCHIVE

September 2002October 2002November 2002December 2002January 2003February 2003March 2003April 2003May 2003June 2003July 2003August 2003September 2003October 2003November 2003December 2003January 2004February 2004March 2004May 2004June 2004July 2004August 2004September 2004October 2004November 2004December 2004January 2005February 2005March 2005April 2005May 2005June 2005July 2005August 2005September 2005October 2005November 2005December 2005January 2006February 2006March 2006April 2006May 2006June 2006July 2006August 2006October 2006November 2006December 2006January 2007February 2007April 2007May 2007June 2007July 2007September 2007October 2007December 2007

SUBSCRIBE

Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Posted by Roberto
3:38 PM 0 comments

SEE WITH YOUR TONGUE AND NAVIGATE WITH YOUR SKIN

How do we sense the world around us?
Eyes collect photons of certain wavelengths, transduce them into electrical signals, and send them to the brain. Ears do the same thing with vibrations in the air - sound waves. Touch receptors pick up pressure, heat, cold, pain. Smell: chemicals contacting receptors inside the nose. Taste: buds of cells on the tongue. There's a reasonably well-accepted sixth sense called proprioception. A network of nerves, in conjunction with the inner ear, tells the brain where the body and all its parts are and how they're oriented.

Can our senses be expanded?
Lots of animals have cool "extra" senses. Sunfish see polarized light. Loggerhead turtles feel Earth's magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. Some birds can detect direction innately. And other critters have heightened versions of familiar senses - bats hear frequencies outside our auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.

Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound?
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.

How do we hack our 5 senses?
The solution is to figure out how to change the sensory data we want - the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared - into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins.

Source: Mixed Feelings, by Sunny Bains, WIRED magazine