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Seeing With Your Skin?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Oct 03, 2008 04:22 PM
from the eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head dept.
from the eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head dept.
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that a researcher from Tel Aviv University is exploring the possibility that humans may be able to "see" via their skin. Professor Leonid Yaroslavsky hopes to utilize this possible technology to find solutions for the blind in addition to new types of image capture that might be able to work where conventional lenses fail. Unfortunately he has a long uphill battle ahead to convince others that his theories are possible. "The lenses currently used for optics-based imaging have many problems. They only work within a limited range of electromagnetic radiation. Relatively, these are still costly devices greatly limited by weight and field of view. The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses and he believes the devices can be adapted to any kind of radiation and wavelength. They could essentially work with a 360-degree field of view and their imaging capability will only be determined by computer power rather than the laws of light diffraction."
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My eyebrows are raised (Score:5, Insightful)
As a vision scientist, my eyebrows are raised. I am highly skeptical for a variety of really, very good reasons...
Re:My eyebrows are raised (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but does that increase or decrease what you're seeing with your forehead?
Parent
Follow the money. (Score:2, Interesting)
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WTF? Tel Aviv University is a very decent research institute that has made many important contributions to science. No, I am not and have never been affiliated with them, but the page you are referring to is obviously that of an alumni organization. And yes, they do raise money for the university, that is what alumni organizations do.
As for Yaroslavsky (the prof working on this "seeing skin" project), I know neither him nor this project (at least not more than the press release states), but his publication
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Obviously the skin can detect many wavelengths of light--I am having trouble jumping from this thought to the thought of the skin resolving those sensations into an image.
Blind people seem to be able to do that with braile. Maybe a pattern of bumps can work in a similar way to a pattern of warm spots on the skin.
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I recall Richard Dawkins saying that eyes tend to evolve from photoreceptive skin cells.
The brain is the most important organ that "sees"; it's the thing that does the image processing. Or, if you look at it another way, the brain constructs the image from available data.
If it were medically possible to stimulate a patch of skin cells to transmit more light information to the brain - and correspondingly stimulate a neural pathway (who knows, maybe even all the
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It's nothing like echolocation. First of all, echolocation is active scanning, vision is passive scanning (nobody can detect you're looking at them, however you can tell if someone's using echolocation). Echolocation is dependant upon 1 or 2 sensors, while vision needs thousands (and prefers millions) of sensors.
The calculations are explained in this link :
arXivBlog [arxivblog.com]
The article makes several good points. After minimal practice you are able to identify the location of the sun blindfolded.
A bit more practice a
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After minimal practice you are able to identify the location of the sun blindfolded.
Some people actually have to practice that? Simply turn around until your face gets warm.
Nevertheless clearly we can detect that radiation.
I dont' think we detect the radiation. We detect the warmth the radiation produces in our skin. So it's not really different from feeling warmth by touching a hot object (both rely on our skin getting warmer). For the rest: i think it's quite possible put maybe this is a differen effect. In pitch-dark rooms you sometimes can "feel" close walls or large solid objects.
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As I understand it, that's more of a matter of the brain rewiring itself to interpret the signals coming from that patch of skin differently than any limitation of the nerves in the skin itself. [wikipedia.org] There is an interesting account of what this is like in an old Wired article [wired.com] around page 5 the author experiences a rather sudden shift as his brain learns to interpret visual signals differently.
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My mother is a teacher and used to work with children who were totally deaf and blind. I was amazed to see how aware they could be of their surroundings, and how much they could learn, though all of their communication was based on touch.
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But surely as a scientist you have an open mind? I don't think they are talking about 'seeing' the way we see to read. The forms of 'skin vision' cited are all ways to detect electromagnetic radiation but none of them would allow one to, for example, read Slashdot. There is vision and there is vision. I think in this case they are just using the term a bit loosely. I'm a bit skeptical about some of the forward looking claims as well, but this might just bear further research.
Re:My eyebrows are raised (Score:5, Interesting)
Argh, too many windows open on the desktop and I clicked submit accidentally before elaborating.
My first concern is that this little "story" or press release has been either re-released or duplicated on various sources verbatim for weeks if not months and I've yet to see anything in the scientific literature about it. Publishing scientific progress in the popular press before peer review typically means bogus science to me.
There certainly are photoreceptive skin cells in "lower" vertebrates and invertebrates that do transduce photosensitive information. However, any experiments I've seen in the literature or in popular press (or even weird Soviet 1960s "dermo optical" experiments that have attempted to evaluate "skin vision" in humans have failed or not accounted for temperature or other confounds.
Parent
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There's no lens to define where the light is coming from when it's reflected to hit the skin
Sweat can bead on the skin and act as a lens, though for evolution of sight it would probably have to be from an aquatic genesis to have become such an ubiquitous solution on Earth, perhaps a membrane protecting sensitive nerve cells becoming progressively thinner generation after generation, improving both in sensitivity and ability to focus as it becomes naturally selected for improved chances of survival both offensively and defensively.
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I remember reading about this in one of those X-files type books in high school ("Strange Energies - Hidden Powers" and "Mysteries of the Undead").
One of the claims was that people could tell which colour a sheet of paper was, even with their eyes closed. They said that blue or purple would "feel colder" than a colour such as red or orange. Since skin can feel infra-red radiation (heat), maybe this was possible.
But they never tested it with a sheet of paper underneath a plastic cover, so the case remains un
Re:My eyebrows are raised (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Actually it should: science doesn't work through faith. The word or untested hypotheses of even the most distinguished scientists isn't good for anything besides deciding what to test next. If Stephen Hawkings said Hawkin's radiation leaks out slightly faster from black holes than he thought and didn't offer proof, there would be plenty of people who would investigate I'm sure, but it wouldn't be accepted as more than conjecture, even though it's named after him.
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Re:My eyebrows are raised (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, I would say that being open to criticism and being able to accept that, move on and improve (based on the criticism) separates the mediocre from the brilliant. It doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. We all make mistakes and we all overlook things. We all say silly things now and again.
This is what makes the "science" of Global Warming so frustrating. Criticism or scepticism is anathema, and we hear the constant chant that "the debate is over". Real science thrives on argument and experiments, and not on ad hominem attacks.
Parent
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Well, that's because it's no longer an academic question. SOME of the skepticism is "economically motivated" and therefore impossible to satisfy. There's also the factor of "if it's right, then waiting until it's a fact will be too late." As someone who won't lose money directly from cutting our use of fossil fuels, of course I'm going to say we should cut them now and potentially have done it for nothing than not cut them now and wish we had.
The science of global warming is now only used as a bat in the
Re:My eyebrows are raised (Score:4, Interesting)
a) Where did I say that I have an "education"?
b) Why do you think that being sceptical is bad?
c) If you think that by typing "skeptical" (mirroring the OP) was bad, then you miss the point.
d) What did I say that sounded "elitist"?
e) Where did I imply that all good scientists must think like me? (Apart from adhering to basic principles)
Parent
Hope springs eternal (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, like any memories from the 60s ...
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...it makes you want to smoke something and listen to the beatles?
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Was that YOU with the groovy acid at Woodstock??? Long time no see! Let's go burn one man.
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Long time no see! Let's go burn one man.
I know you feel like celebrating, but that's no excuse to go around burning people.
Done before, using different sensory organ (Score:5, Informative)
Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita who was at UW Madison has done something with vision being projected via electrical stimulation on the tongue. It is called sensory substitution.
I've seen it first hand. It works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution [wikipedia.org]
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...and a project (also from the UW) involving several guys I know, called Visual Taste [uwinnovators.com] does that as well. There are pictures and videos, if the average slashdot reader can be troubled to follow the link...
Sir, Put Your Shirt Back On. (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm just having a look around."
Seriously, though:
Did anybody else read this, "Homeland Security grants, DARPA grants, or NASA grants would all be just fine."
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He expects these devices to have special sensors for detecting radiation at sea and in airports to identify terrorist threats, innovative night vision devices or near-weightless mechanisms to steer spaceships in space.
Did anybody else read this, "Homeland Security grants, DARPA grants, or NASA grants would all be just fine."
My spidey sense is tingling.
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And did else anyone read this...
"The lenses currently used for optics-based imaging have many problems. They only work within a limited range of electromagnetic radiation. Relatively, these are still costly devices greatly limited by weight and field of view. The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses and he believes the devices can be adapted to any kind of radiation and wavelength. They could essentially work with a 360-degree field of view and their imaging capability will only be determined by computer power rather than the laws of light diffraction."
Hmm. (Score:2)
Light sensitive cells are common enough in various organisms, including in configurations with rudimentary or nonexistent lens structures, so there is no reason to believe that humans having some light sensitive structures on their skin
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But generally, in all the work I've done (my graduate thesis is focusing on optical imaging with a lensless system) most of those kind of things, where you detect the magnitude of the wave-pattern, which in the far field is the Fourier transform, and then reconstruct the phase, it relies on having a relatively well-defined maximum region. I haven't looked at this yet, but I can't see this using techniques like those of X-Ray crystallography or SAR.
Ummm it's called a sunburn (Score:5, Interesting)
That's probably how the eyes started, as a sensitive patch of skin. Sight would be a different interpretation of pain, with color being different degrees of pain.
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More likely it would have been felt as something like heat, rather than pain. Intensity (temperature?) maps to brightness, not color. Color probably didn't come until something more eye-like had evolved - you wouldn't get color sensitivity from skin, only intensity/temperature. AFAIK color isn't as useful until after you have certain other things - light sensitivity first, to know if something's there. Then directionality, to know where. Then resolution, to know what is is. Color is an additional refinement
This was a "psychic" trick in the 70s. (Score:2)
Back then it was called "demo-optical perception." It was complete crap that only worked if the person was wearing a poorly-designed blindfold. In a properly conducted test, this "power" disappeared entirely.
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Back then it was called "demo-optical perception."
Citation needed. Oh wait [ntu.edu.tw].
Sorry, misspelling. (Score:4, Interesting)
Meant to write "dermo-optical perception." As for citations, see Carl Sagan or Martin Gardner.
Parent
Obvious in retrospect (Score:5, Funny)
The next stage after talking out your ass.
That was the most content-free science article... (Score:2)
...ever.
There's no mechanism proposed, just some vague waffle about some organisms having IR sensitive skin and some nonsense about computer simulation. I wonder if there's even anything sensible behind this article or if it's a bogus article about some bogus science.
Cognitive Science: This sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall a discussion about this in a cognitive science class I took about 3 years ago. Apparently, somebody developed an aparatus that was hooked to a person's back and used pins to provide a monochrome image of what a camera on the person's head was displaying. The interesting part was that they discovered that the visual part of the brain ended up being used to process the images. Eventually the person could see...sort of.
Of course, this kind of trick won't work at all if the person is blind because of a brain problem rather than an eye problem. People who lose their sight overly early on in life will not necessarily develop their visual cortex enough for this type of technology to work. However, people who lose their eyes as adults or teens due to accidents will be fine.
Can we mark this "Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bear with me, I am thinking out loud here
Very interesting theory. So, we all know that what we see, hear, whatever, is caused by different wavelengths. So, why is it that we can only see in one wavelength spectrum and hear in another? Hmmm. So, if there is a way to slightly shift those wavelengths that another sensory in the body can understand, I doubt you could "see", but, with proper training, I guess it would be possible to train that sense to make sense (no pun intended) of the data.
Then again, I may be totally forgetting something, and this doesn't make any sense at all and I could just be spouting off BS.
However, if this is possible, then this could be a different way of recording data from the world around us. I understand how the eye works, and I understand how a camera works. But, if we use something different than optics to record wavelengths in the visual spectrum, and use a computer program to interperate that data into something we could see.... Hmmm, its a longshot, but it sounds highly fascinating to me.
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That will come in handy ... (Score:4, Funny)