Sensory Augmentation: Tools and Technologies

Beyond the Five Senses

• The world we experience is not the real world but a mental construction filtered through our physical senses.
• Technology has long been used to help people who have lost, or were born without, one of the five primary senses.
• Researchers are developing tools to give people additional senses, ones that imitate those of other animals, or that add capabilities nature never imagined.

Hearing Pictures

• Cochlear implants use electrode arrays to stimulate the auditory nerve inside the ear.
• BrainPort V100 connects a camera on glasses to a grid of electrodes on a person's tongue giving the sensation of bubbles
• A Dutch device called the vOICe ("Oh I see!") uses a camera to create a soundscape that the vision-impaired wearer hears through headphones.
• David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, developed a vest that turns sound into a pattern of vibrations on the torso, helping deaf people interpret speech and other sounds.
• Autistic people might even gain a stronger social sense with devices like the EQ-Radio, which detects heart rate and breathing patterns.

Borrowing From Nature

• A handheld device called the Bottlenose uses ultrasound to detect the distance of objects, then vibrates the user's finger at different frequencies, giving him or her echolocation.
• feelSpace sells the naviBelt, a belt that points you in your desired direction by vibrating on your waist.
• Cyborg Nest sells the North Sense, a device you can attach to your chest that vibrates when pointing north.
• Future cochlear implants could be tuned to pick up low frequencies used by elephants or high frequencies used by dolphins.
• Bionic eyes could be built to allow humans to see ultraviolet rays (as butterflies, reindeer, dogs and other animals can) and infrared light (as certain snakes, fish, and mosquitoes can).

Sensing Moonquakes

• The vibrating vest Eagleman created can be programmed to receive any input, not just sound like the stock market or the pitch and yaw of drone.
• Neil Harbisson had a camera surgically attached to his skull in 2004, which vibrates at different frequencies, turning colors into sound.
• His friend and collaborator Moon Ribas has a wireless chip in her arm that vibrates when earthquakes occur anywhere in the world, giving her a seismic sense.

Literal Groupthink

• Kevin Warwick, wirelessly connected an electrode in his arm to one in his wife's arm, so that wherever they were, they could feel when the other flexed a hand.
• Eagleman wants to wirelessly connect heart and sweat monitors on his wife and himself so they can sense each other's moods.
• Research by Rao shows that people can send yes/no messages telepathically using EEG to sense brain activity in the sender and magnetic pulses to the brain of the receiver.
• Elon Musk recently started a company called Neuralink focused on connecting brains to computers, which he says could someday enable computer-mediated telepathy.