Hacking Our Five Senses and Building New Ones 290
ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."'"
We have SEVEN senses (Score:5, Informative)
This "five senses" garbage is a favorite example of mine for illustrating how everyone, everywhere, including textbooks, can be obviously mistaken about something 'factual'.
Our sixth sense is accelleration, and the sense organ responsible for this is the semicircular canals in our inner ear. It's how we know where 'down' is, and life would be difficult without this sense. Our seventh sense is proprioception, derived from muscle feedback all over the body.
These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.
Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect.
Re:Radio would be fun to see (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Radio would be fun to see (Score:4, Informative)
Bernoulli (Score:5, Informative)
"Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect."
Heck, yeah. It's nutty and irresponsible how we pump everyone full of the Bernoulli effect with respect to flight. With low power systems, you probably need the Bernoulli effect, but the more power you have, the more we're talking about a sled/surfboard, rather than an airfoil. This is true in old Cesnas, for goodness sake, and they are tiny and light. Still, the wing generally isn't giving you quite enough lift to keep you up when you fly with the nose completely flat. You MUST have some sledding angle against the oncoming airstream to maintain altitude.
Re:Chose a sense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bernoulli (Score:4, Informative)
No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.
Re:Radio would be fun to see (Score:3, Informative)
When you see light, you most assuredly do 'see' the actual beams, as they bounce off objects. That is the entire mechanic.
As such, if you were to come up with a magical "radio wave" detector that worked just as eyes do, you'd see areas in your FOV which were 'brighter' as radio waves bounced off them or something actually emitted them (similar to a light bulb).
And as a resident of an urban environment that has to deal with bounced TV signals screwing up my reception all the time, I can assure you that while the waves pass through alot, there is also alot they don't quite make it through. And given our modern society is chock full of radio transmiters (from RFID to cell phones to unintentional items such as computer equipment) you shouldn't have a problem with 'illumination'.
The real question would be: how would you map the various radio wave lengths to what your eyes would actually be able to see? Visible light is a very small portion of the EM spectrum.
Re:perhaps senses we don't realize we have? (Score:4, Informative)
(Hint: Cows point north, but not necessarily magnetic north, which can be off by a VERY large margin in some areas.)
The disparity between polar north and magnetic north is exactly what led the researchers to conclude that the cattle are EMF sensing. From the 2008 paper:
"To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north."
Re:Compass belt (Score:3, Informative)
Or an iPhone app plus an armband connected by a wire or bluetooth. There's a million dollar idea for you.
Why? The iPhone doesn't have the sensors you need, and even if it did, you don't want the output changing as you move your phone. Besides, the components required to do Bluetooth are as complicated as the components needed to do the entire thing self-contained.
some women can see four primary colors (Score:4, Informative)
The primate third color gene is on the X-chromosome next to the 2nd color gene. The evolutionary mechanism is thought to be gene duplication with mutation of one copy. This mechanism very common. Some human females have been observed to have a fourth color gene which is similar to the recently evolved one.
Scientists have inserted the 3rd color gene into rats which normally just have two genes. These rats can be trained to can distinguish more subtle colors then. Apparently no extra genes are need to wire the brain to see extra colors.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chose a sense (Score:4, Informative)
I thought we had 11 senses... [wikipedia.org] Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!
As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.
So how many senses do we have?
You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor [wikipedia.org] as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina [wikipedia.org] is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch [thinkquest.org],smell [wikipedia.org], and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).
We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system [wikipedia.org] (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.
The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".
There are valid [wikipedia.org] historical reasons [annualreviews.org] why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank [wikipedia.org] of human experience?
and yes, IAAN (i am a neuroscientist).