Sensory Augmentation.

[swestrup]

For a while now I've been seeing the headlines for this story in my various science newsletters and ignoring it. After all, it may be physically possible to translate the signal from a video camera to an 'imager' that traces a low-res image on your tongue, but how practical is that, really? You wouldn't be able to read, and you couldn't talk when using it. Actually reading the article was a surprise though. The people who get this done to them don't end up feeling shapes with their tongues, as I imagined, but actually get the sensation of seeing. And, if different sensory information is encoded, like sound or balance signals, then the body interprets that as coming from the appropriate sense. In the case of something like touch, the brain will even interpret the signal as if it is coming from the patch of skin that should be feeling that sensation.

This is a far higher level of brain sensory plasticity than I ever imagined was possible, and opens up many possible avenues of not just restoring lost senses, but augmenting them. If you used this technique to convey magnetic flux detection (for example), could you get the sensation of 'seeing' magnetic field lines? Can we somehow allow people to hear in the ultra or subsonic with this technology?  Suddenly, I'm very interested.

Comments

[swestrup]

Would you have any chance of locating that article?

As luck would have it...

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I'm almost ready to start using Google as a bookmark page. Months ago and faint recollection and I was able to pull it on a I'm Feeling Lucky.

http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20040226.html