Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey that everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says you
Speaker 1: want to fill up my senses like a night in
Speaker 1: the forest. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bock Obama, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So, hey, guys, I wanna bombard your
Speaker 1: brains with a little bit of weirdness. Do you ever
Speaker 1: think about the fact that the way the world looks
Speaker 1: to you is not necessarily how the world actually is?
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to get all philosophical like what
Speaker 1: is reality or anything like that. No, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: comment actually on the nature of the way we perceive.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that your eyes don't give you
Speaker 1: accurate information about the world, because they do a pretty
Speaker 1: good job of creating a model of reality that's useful
Speaker 1: for us. All our brain messes it up a little
Speaker 1: bit in translation, but sure, yeah, yeah sometimes. But what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about is that the model of reality created
Speaker 1: by light through our eyes, as interpreted by our brains,
Speaker 1: is not the only way to create an accurate model
Speaker 1: of the physical world. Rights necessarily limited. I mean, when
Speaker 1: we talk about the visible spectrum of light, that immediately
Speaker 1: tells you that there is a spectrum that is not
Speaker 1: visible to us. So if we were able to see
Speaker 1: the entire spectrum of light, the world would look very different.
Speaker 1: So knowing that there are entire sections of light, and
Speaker 1: that's just one of our senses, right, We've got plenty
Speaker 1: of senses. We're gonna be talking about this episode of
Speaker 1: our primaries. It's one of those ones that's easy to
Speaker 1: talk about. It's it means that our perception of the
Speaker 1: world around us is by necessity limited, and that there's
Speaker 1: stuff going on all over the place that we just
Speaker 1: cannot even perceive. Yeah, we've got only a small wedge
Speaker 1: of any given spectrum of stuff that we can take
Speaker 1: in by our senses. Yeah. Well, what you bring up
Speaker 1: there is that there are ways of creating models of
Speaker 1: reality that don't even necessarily use light. Right, they don't
Speaker 1: use electromagnetic radiation like you could use sound, or you
Speaker 1: could maybe interpret the world in terms of chemicals. Right,
Speaker 1: if you had really chemo receptors, like maybe a very
Speaker 1: strong sense of smell could actually let you determine the
Speaker 1: relative locations of objects around you exactly. So in this episode,
Speaker 1: we wanted to explore the idea of augmenting our senses,
Speaker 1: perhaps extending our senses so that we have new ones
Speaker 1: beyond the ones we already have, so not just boosting
Speaker 1: the ones we have already, the ones that everyone is
Speaker 1: familiar with. Are are familiar with, and you can use
Speaker 1: a telescope to see farther that's that's a no brain
Speaker 1: or you could use uh, you know, other other technology
Speaker 1: to allow you to see things that you normally couldn't see.
Speaker 1: For example, night vision goggles allow you to see at night,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk a little bit about some other
Speaker 1: technologies that might allow that sort of thing too, in
Speaker 1: various ways. Basically, we want to focus on the eventual
Speaker 1: possibility of radically augmenting the way we create models of
Speaker 1: the physical world with our brains. So I guess we
Speaker 1: should start by talking about the senses we already have.
Speaker 1: And one of the cool facts about our bodies is
Speaker 1: that you have way more senses than you realize or
Speaker 1: probably realized. Well, it's more than just those five senses
Speaker 1: that we all learned about and say kindergarten, right, Although
Speaker 1: some argue that these other senses will be talking about
Speaker 1: somehow are wrapped up in one or more senses. So
Speaker 1: it all depends upon who who's doing the talking. Right.
Speaker 1: In some cases you have someone saying, no, there are
Speaker 1: no x number of senses that are way more than five,
Speaker 1: and other people would say, well, let's be fair, three
Speaker 1: or four of the ones you mentioned are really wrapped
Speaker 1: up in the five five big ones. But it all
Speaker 1: is ongoing debate, and it again depends really from your
Speaker 1: point of view. But yes, it is more complicated than
Speaker 1: just saying, what is a site? Smell? There's also what that?
Speaker 1: There's a taste, there's that touch and hearing. Right, let's
Speaker 1: talk the big five, all right, what is site? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's seeing. It's also no, I know that it's
Speaker 1: also does it Workalmo exception? That's what it's also called
Speaker 1: Falmo exception? That it sells in your eyes that are
Speaker 1: that are sensitive to light. Yeah, yeah, and so and
Speaker 1: so yeah, to photons, right, and so they absorbed photons
Speaker 1: and send a signal to your brain and tell it
Speaker 1: some stuff. Yea, the brain. The brain actually does a
Speaker 1: lot of the work here. So we've got essentially photo receptors.
Speaker 1: So kind of similar to what you would think of
Speaker 1: in any kind of light sensor. It's it's the organic
Speaker 1: equivalent to that. So you have these photoreceptors, you've got
Speaker 1: rods and cones. They are able to do different things. Um,
Speaker 1: and the number that you have will determine what kind
Speaker 1: of site you have based on from organism to organism,
Speaker 1: because different organisms have different arrays. Right, So something like
Speaker 1: a bird of prey has much keener sight than say,
Speaker 1: a human being does. Other animals may have vision that
Speaker 1: is not nearly as strong as what a human being has,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, we have these photoreceptor cells that
Speaker 1: can detect light that's coming. They're able to see these
Speaker 1: visible images from the visible light spectrum, lights bouncing off
Speaker 1: of stuff right into our eyes. That sends the little
Speaker 1: electrical impulses to our brain, which then can interpret it
Speaker 1: and turn that into what we consider images. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the way things look to us really are just ways
Speaker 1: our brain makes sense of different pieces of data. So
Speaker 1: like when you see two different colors, the the actual
Speaker 1: physical data difference there is that you've got different wavelengths
Speaker 1: of light coming into your eyes. Yeah, which is why
Speaker 1: I blame everybody else for saying I'm not devastatingly handsome,
Speaker 1: because it's really how they're constructing me in their brains,
Speaker 1: not me. It's nothing. They don't realize how green you are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's a constant source of irritation. But no, no,
Speaker 1: so that. But this again, this kind of illustrates this idea,
Speaker 1: and not to get again to philosophical or metaphysical, but
Speaker 1: this idea that a lot of what we consider reality
Speaker 1: is this construct that's happening in our minds. It's it's
Speaker 1: our brains being able to interpret all the information, the
Speaker 1: data that's coming in. It's making sense of it. It's
Speaker 1: not that the data doesn't reflect something real, but the
Speaker 1: way we put it together is a simulation going on
Speaker 1: in the brain. Yeah, yeah, so interesting there. Next, we've
Speaker 1: got in our our notes here we have smell the
Speaker 1: alpha conception. That's just one way of spelling it. I
Speaker 1: think it's old facco exception, all faccoception, there's all Well,
Speaker 1: there's actually three or four different spellings of it, and
Speaker 1: it all depends upon the spelling. There's some that have
Speaker 1: no O in it. Disclaimer. Now, a lot of the
Speaker 1: single word names for some of these senses have different
Speaker 1: spell things and stuff. So don't write in correcting us.
Speaker 1: We know right right, we just don't know how to
Speaker 1: say them. So that's that part you can write in
Speaker 1: about you don't know how to say this. Yes, what
Speaker 1: happens in your nose? All right? You got these receptors,
Speaker 1: so molecular receptors in your nose that think of them
Speaker 1: as sort of it's like a key and lock situation.
Speaker 1: You have these receptors that bind with certain moleculear molecular shapes, right,
Speaker 1: So when those molecules make contact with those receptors, then
Speaker 1: you have a signal sent to the brain that says
Speaker 1: AD that is X smell. So you have hundreds of
Speaker 1: different types of receptors in your in your nose, joe uh,
Speaker 1: in any given persons, if any given persons knows. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: if you were to look at say, other animals, they
Speaker 1: have maybe a wider range and a lot more of them.
Speaker 1: Dogs have like two twenty million of these receptor cells,
Speaker 1: not different types, but in across the various range of types,
Speaker 1: And so the number determines how well you can smell,
Speaker 1: how how well you can detect an odor to no
Speaker 1: matter how faint the smell might be like how little
Speaker 1: of that molecule might be in the atmosphere. Maybe how
Speaker 1: little of a difference you can tell? Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then so yeah, the kinds that we have, the different
Speaker 1: molecules which represent different smells can bind to those different receptors.
Speaker 1: That sends the signal to our brain very much the
Speaker 1: way the light can makes a nerve impulse go to
Speaker 1: our brain and our brain interprets it. So when you
Speaker 1: stop and smell the roses, the molecules you're inhaling are
Speaker 1: binding too specific receptors in your nasal passages. Essentially, we're
Speaker 1: talking like little neurons firing off. Let's talk about a
Speaker 1: related sense, taste, Taste. Yeah, taste and smell are very
Speaker 1: closely related. In fact, taste and smell together are what
Speaker 1: allows us to detect flavor. Right, Because taste and flavor
Speaker 1: are two different things, a lot of us kind of
Speaker 1: equate the two. Sure, but um, I mean that's the
Speaker 1: reason if, for example, you've ever been sick and noticed
Speaker 1: that food tastes very different when your nose is stuffed up,
Speaker 1: this is why, right, exactly. Yeah, And there are so
Speaker 1: many times where I've been sick and there's certain things
Speaker 1: that the tastes are very simple or the flavors are
Speaker 1: very simple. I should say the flavors are very simple,
Speaker 1: and therefore the taste is not that different, and I
Speaker 1: go with it. So something like tomato soup or chicken
Speaker 1: noodle soup tend to have very simple flavors and so
Speaker 1: you don't lose a whole lot in translation. Well, it's
Speaker 1: also your your tongue is really good at receiving certain chemicals, like,
Speaker 1: for example, salt is something that's hard to smell but
Speaker 1: very easy to taste, and so that's something that that's
Speaker 1: why salty food like like chicken broth is is kind
Speaker 1: of fine for for it doesn't taste that weird, right, Right, So,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, we have these sensory receptors that
Speaker 1: buying two very specific types of molecules very much kind
Speaker 1: of like the smell. In this case, you have the
Speaker 1: bay taste, which include these sweet, better sour, salty, and
Speaker 1: then oh mommy or savory. Yeah, so this is these
Speaker 1: smell and taste would both be sort of a form
Speaker 1: of chemo seption, right, sensing chemicals exactly. Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: is where with a site, we've got light when you
Speaker 1: talk about hearing or touch, you're talking about actual physical experiences.
Speaker 1: Because sound a sound is sound is motion. Really, it's
Speaker 1: it's motion of molecules in the air that are colliding
Speaker 1: with each other. If there weren't that motion, for example,
Speaker 1: if you were in the space in a vacuum, then
Speaker 1: you wouldn't hear anything because there'll be nothing to move
Speaker 1: and therefore nothing to stimulate your your sense of hearing,
Speaker 1: because your sense of hearing depends upon little tiny follicles,
Speaker 1: follicle like structures that vibrate when they come into contact
Speaker 1: with these moving molecules, that then continue to send signals
Speaker 1: further on. Like in human ears, we have these delicate
Speaker 1: bones that then end up pressing against uh kind of
Speaker 1: a chamber that's filled with fluid that has other little
Speaker 1: cilia type hairs in it sounds beautiful, yeah, And and
Speaker 1: the motion, the motion of the fluid within that chamber
Speaker 1: moves the cilia, which then send the electrical signals to
Speaker 1: your brain, which you then interpret as sound. A lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of similar things here. Your your favorite
Speaker 1: music is really just all hairs in fluid. Fluid and fluid,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the name of my guar cover band. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so don't steal it. Okay, what about touch, the last
Speaker 1: one in the big five? Yeah, tect the reception. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about neural receptors that are along things
Speaker 1: like under your skin, hair follicles, another good example. This
Speaker 1: is mostly detecting changes in pressure. So when you press
Speaker 1: up against something that those changes in pressure, what you
Speaker 1: detect that ends up turning to these again nerve impulses
Speaker 1: that get sent to your central nervous system and then
Speaker 1: get interpreted by Mr. Braining as Oh that's what that is?
Speaker 1: Why Mr Brain? Why not brain or mrs brain? Really?
Speaker 1: How about dr brain? Dr brain? A dr brain? My
Speaker 1: brain isn't that smart most days? Right? Okay? How about
Speaker 1: this though? Did you know you've got senses that don't
Speaker 1: even make the top five? We we alluded to this earlier.
Speaker 1: How about this one, which I think is really cool.
Speaker 1: Everybody sort of knows they have it, but they don't
Speaker 1: think to distinguish it. It's called Approprioception comes from approprio,
Speaker 1: the idea of one's own sense, yes, sense of one's
Speaker 1: own body, as in, you are you know where your
Speaker 1: body parts are in relation to each other, even without
Speaker 1: other senses getting in the way, right, try a little
Speaker 1: experiment here. Okay, close your eyes and clap your hands.
Speaker 1: I hit the mic. No, but probably most to the time,
Speaker 1: you can do this. Why can you do this? Why
Speaker 1: can you see? You can tell where your hands are
Speaker 1: in relationship to each other without looking at them. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this, it's this sense, this ability for us to
Speaker 1: uh to figure out where our body parts are. Another
Speaker 1: example one that's commonly given in in lecture halls when
Speaker 1: they talk about the source of stuff or just even
Speaker 1: just grade school, that kind of thing. Close your eyes
Speaker 1: and attempt to touch your own nose, and that again
Speaker 1: shows that you are aware of the position of where
Speaker 1: your nose is, where your finger is in relation to
Speaker 1: the nose, even while it's moving and then ending up someplace.
Speaker 1: You're able to process all of that without any sort
Speaker 1: of visual stimulation. Right. If you've taken a drug or
Speaker 1: had an injury that has impaired your sense of appropriate reception,
Speaker 1: you might have trouble doing these things without looking at
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Sure. Yeah, so that's a pretty cool one,
Speaker 1: this idea of uh, you know. And and again it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where do you call it a
Speaker 1: sense and there's some people who argue about the sense.
Speaker 1: I think so too. But Joe, there are people who don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that I don't Joe, don't get offended.
Speaker 1: I don't know I think that anyone who's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's you. You juggle, Jonathan, and and and that's kind
Speaker 1: of how you how you make that happen. You have
Speaker 1: to know where your hands are without looking at Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can actually get to a point and once you
Speaker 1: get used to it, you can get to a point
Speaker 1: where you can maintain eye contact with other people and
Speaker 1: have a conversation and still continue to juggle. It's easier
Speaker 1: for me to to do it that way than to
Speaker 1: actually watch what I'm doing. If I watch what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: I freak out and drop everything nice, humble, where yell. Look.
Speaker 1: I don't juggle a lot, but when I do, it's
Speaker 1: on fire and it's sharp. Speaking of things that are
Speaker 1: on fire and sharp, how about no susception? A sense
Speaker 1: of pain? Yeah, this is a sense of pain, which
Speaker 1: people believe is actually independent from your sense of touch,
Speaker 1: So you use different it's a different neural system exactly
Speaker 1: in this case. Pain comes in various varieties. Anyone who's
Speaker 1: been fortunate enough to experience these knows them well. If
Speaker 1: you've juggled flaming machetes, yeah, since you can. You can
Speaker 1: divide these into pain that you sense along your skin,
Speaker 1: pain that is in your your joints or your bones,
Speaker 1: and pain that's in your internal organs. Um. I'm sure
Speaker 1: we've all experienced these to some degree or another. Pain
Speaker 1: is essentially the body's way of a detecting a threat
Speaker 1: and telling you, hey, you should probably get away from that.
Speaker 1: Something is getting damaged, so stop what you're doing and
Speaker 1: don't do it anymore. Right. So, Now, obviously there are
Speaker 1: some types of injuries that end up impairing this. For example,
Speaker 1: if you were to suffer a truly serious burn, talking
Speaker 1: like third degree burn, then it can be so bad
Speaker 1: that it ends up frying the destroying so then you
Speaker 1: could end up not feeling the pain until it's really
Speaker 1: a terrible injury. But in general, this is an effective
Speaker 1: warning system. It really gives you a an incentive to
Speaker 1: stop doing whatever it is that's causing the problem. This
Speaker 1: is also a sense that can be impaired on its own,
Speaker 1: and people can be unable to feel certain types of pain,
Speaker 1: and this can actually be dangerous. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: cool thing, but it's not something you want, right because
Speaker 1: if you are unable to feel pain, then you also
Speaker 1: may be unaware if you are suffering a type of injury.
Speaker 1: You might be leaning against a hot stove and burning
Speaker 1: your skin and you don't even know, right, or you
Speaker 1: could be freezing, you know, it's another temperature. Temperature sensing
Speaker 1: is a little different from pain sensing, but because we
Speaker 1: also have that is our their most their most sception.
Speaker 1: But but it can also lead to sensing pain, depending
Speaker 1: upon if it's reaching a yeah, I have a question, Sure,
Speaker 1: what's the sense that lets me know whether or not
Speaker 1: I'm upside down? Equiliberal exception, which is that's that's when
Speaker 1: you uh, that's more to do with that inner ear
Speaker 1: fluid of yours. Yes, yeah, your woe is more of
Speaker 1: a matrixception. Equilibrium was an excellent movie and very similar
Speaker 1: to the Matrix. I wouldn't call that an excellent movie
Speaker 1: the matrix anyway. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna have a
Speaker 1: nerd fight when we get out of this one. Equilibrio reception. Alright,
Speaker 1: so the tune into our past nerd fights. We keep
Speaker 1: we keep threatening to do that, and who knows, maybe
Speaker 1: one day that will happen. Uh, equilibrio reception. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the sense of balance. You're You're right, it is, Lauren.
Speaker 1: It does involve the inner ear because partially partially yeah,
Speaker 1: because we're we're talking about being able to detect things
Speaker 1: like angular momentum and acceleration, linear momentum and acceleration, and
Speaker 1: being able to to maintain our sense of balance even
Speaker 1: as we move around. I mean, anyone who has ever
Speaker 1: just I mean just just being able to walk like
Speaker 1: you need that sense of balance in order to be
Speaker 1: able to do that. If if you were only standing
Speaker 1: perfectly still in the same orientation for your entire life,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be so important. But we like to move around,
Speaker 1: and we encounter environments that are not always perfectly level
Speaker 1: or perfectly stationary, and so obviously we need to have
Speaker 1: that sense of balance to be able to to navigate that.
Speaker 1: Of course, the cool thing about that is you're actually
Speaker 1: not detecting movement. You're detecting acceleration or deceleration, because we're
Speaker 1: always moving on the Earth and we don't feel that. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: we're used to it. If we were, if we were
Speaker 1: feeling the rotation and and the revolution of the earth
Speaker 1: around the sun. We probably never stopped screaming, all right, good,
Speaker 1: good point, Jonathan. Just think we'd be like, I can't
Speaker 1: do anything else because I'm too business. There's so many
Speaker 1: good reasons to never stop screaming. Oh my goodness, gracious. Okay,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there are other senses that we could talk about.
Speaker 1: You know, there's your sense of hunger, there's your sense
Speaker 1: of thirst. There's senses that we have internally that relate
Speaker 1: to various types of experiences we could have. Some would
Speaker 1: argue that some of them are related to things like
Speaker 1: temperature or pain. It all depends upon again, who's doing
Speaker 1: the talking, right, Yeah, and I guess there are some
Speaker 1: we we still might have questions about, Like does it
Speaker 1: make sense to call chronoception the sense of the passage
Speaker 1: of time a sense? Is that a sense? Or is
Speaker 1: that yeah? Or is that just a short term and
Speaker 1: long term memory interaction. Yeah, it's the way that we codify,
Speaker 1: especially considering that our memories are are very very very fallible,
Speaker 1: right that that, uh, we're malleable or both malleables. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an even better way of putting it. Lauren because
Speaker 1: as we well, it is. I would call it ductile.
Speaker 1: I call it plastic, all right. At any rate, Look, Joe,
Speaker 1: you're very smart too. I don't I don't mean to,
Speaker 1: I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Stuff. I love you both,
Speaker 1: all right, You're both my favorite so anyway, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: memory is malleable. Memory can change. We can We've known this,
Speaker 1: like we know that I witness testimony in court cases,
Speaker 1: while it tends to bear a lot of weight among jurors,
Speaker 1: is not terribly reliable because our memories are not not
Speaker 1: even close to reliable. Okay, I want to get to
Speaker 1: other senses, and by other I mean beyond human senses.
Speaker 1: So these are senses that you might find in other organisms,
Speaker 1: but not in human beings. Well, you might find them
Speaker 1: in some very small way in human beings, but not
Speaker 1: in a really appreciable sense, not in a way that
Speaker 1: would be of any real use to the average person.
Speaker 1: Although we have some exceptions with a couple of these,
Speaker 1: the first one we want to talk about, magneto reception,
Speaker 1: might be different. This is how you are able to
Speaker 1: sense X Men comic books, Magneto reception or magneto reception.
Speaker 1: Magneto reception or whatever you want to say. It's the
Speaker 1: way an organism senses magnetic fields. This is one that
Speaker 1: I think there's some controversy over the extent to which
Speaker 1: this is present in humans. But we don't have a
Speaker 1: very strong of magneto reception, if we have any at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some people who argue that if you were to say,
Speaker 1: live near power lines where you have a lot of
Speaker 1: alternating current, that could end up making you not feel well,
Speaker 1: which would suggest that there would be some sort of
Speaker 1: magneto reception mechanism going on there, But double blind studies
Speaker 1: don't seem to bear that out yet. I mean, mostly
Speaker 1: the research that I've read has suggested that in many organisms, um,
Speaker 1: and end result of being exposed to magnetic fields is
Speaker 1: a subproduction of calcium ions which which can which can
Speaker 1: affect your your your overall health and well being. Um.
Speaker 1: But that's like super not tested research, I mean, and
Speaker 1: it's also not something that you would necessarily like detect
Speaker 1: the presence of a magnetic field. You'd be affected by
Speaker 1: the presence, right. Well, another thing that might be there
Speaker 1: is like, well, what if humans can use some in
Speaker 1: a sort of very subcon just magnetic information to help
Speaker 1: them navigate. Like people who are good at finding their
Speaker 1: way around, there are some animals who can seriously do
Speaker 1: that really well, yeah, like like uncannily for reals. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is what allows birds that migrate to in some
Speaker 1: cases migrate from the north pole to the south pole
Speaker 1: every year, right, ridiculous. Well, it's because the Earth generates
Speaker 1: its own magnetic field. And if you know that, well
Speaker 1: maybe not. No, let's just let's not talk about cognition.
Speaker 1: But you're a bird that needs to go north at
Speaker 1: a certain time of the year, needs to go south
Speaker 1: at a different time of the year, and you have
Speaker 1: something going on in your brain and nervous system that
Speaker 1: that triggers that instinct. Okay, now is the time to
Speaker 1: follow this magnetic signal? Right there? As I recall in
Speaker 1: the novel version of Jurassic Park, actually the dinosaurs yeah,
Speaker 1: and so they align themselves with the magnetic fields because
Speaker 1: and which proved one of the scientists theory, and he
Speaker 1: got all excited about it even as he was also
Speaker 1: about to dinosaurs. Yeah, alright, So how does it work
Speaker 1: in birds? Uh? Research indicates that that it's vision based
Speaker 1: and light dependent. Um that that birds can only orient
Speaker 1: themselves magnetically if blue wavelengths of light are present. Um
Speaker 1: that the hypothesis here again this has not proven, is
Speaker 1: that birds see magnetic fields perhaps is as like dark
Speaker 1: or bright spots in their vision that move in pattern
Speaker 1: as the bird scans a scene. Uh, which is also
Speaker 1: which also falls in line with the way that we
Speaker 1: watch birds behave when they're when they're migrating. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So I remember reading about this when I was writing
Speaker 1: the video script. Is this cool idea that birds could
Speaker 1: actually see the magnetic fields like a grid over the
Speaker 1: vision that they have of normal light reflective, which is
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Like I would have I would have first
Speaker 1: imagined it to be more of a sense of touch,
Speaker 1: just just if I were thinking of this without any
Speaker 1: extra without the information here, If you had just told me,
Speaker 1: how do you think it happens? I would have thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's probably some sort of feeling thing. It wouldn't have
Speaker 1: occurred to me that it was a visual possibly a
Speaker 1: visual thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They think it might have
Speaker 1: to do with like the spins of entangled electrons and
Speaker 1: molecule pairs inside the bird's eyes. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you want to dumb it down for everything. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean obviously they are not. The birds are not
Speaker 1: the only animals that have used magnetic fields to help navigate. No,
Speaker 1: what about bees? Yeah, yeah, well there's there's lots. There's salmon,
Speaker 1: sea turtles, spotted newts, lobsters, and fruit flies. I'll also
Speaker 1: do this. But but bees are a really interesting example
Speaker 1: because there's been a lot of research done into both
Speaker 1: bees and birds actually in the past decade or so.
Speaker 1: Um and yeah, bees can even be trained to respond
Speaker 1: in certain ways if they send a magnetic field training bees.
Speaker 1: I want to do that so much. Um. I love bees. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so Halo player accurate. Um. So, researchers think that that
Speaker 1: the sense works like this. So, so, the bees produce
Speaker 1: an iron oxide called called magnetite in their bodies, and
Speaker 1: that magnetite gets stored in nanoparticle form inside a type
Speaker 1: of cell called a trophosyte um. And in the presence
Speaker 1: of a magnetic field, the particles either group together or
Speaker 1: move apart. And and at this size of particle that
Speaker 1: the process is called super paramagnetism. That's your word of
Speaker 1: the day in case you ever need that one. Um, good,
Speaker 1: good ten cent word. But so these these changes in
Speaker 1: particle size trigger the release of those calcium ions that
Speaker 1: I was talking about earlier, and they react with other
Speaker 1: stuff in the cell and initiate this this neural response.
Speaker 1: Interesting and also, of course, as I see here, we've
Speaker 1: we've got a little note about bug senses that go
Speaker 1: beyond the magneto reception and also just into other peculiarities
Speaker 1: of their site. Yeah yeah, um so so bees, butterflies
Speaker 1: and law of other insects can see polarized light, which
Speaker 1: is not a thing that humans can see. It means
Speaker 1: that they can navigate by the sun's position even when
Speaker 1: it's cloudy. Um. They think that it comes from a
Speaker 1: certain type of ibit. Inside of insects come compound eyes
Speaker 1: because most insects have several pairs of eyes, and and
Speaker 1: so that the compound ones have lots of little repeating parts,
Speaker 1: and some of them contain these specialized photo receptors. I
Speaker 1: want to I'm going to try and say the word.
Speaker 1: I didn't look it up, So amatidia sounds great to me.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's the name of the ibit. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. And then it's my favorite ibit. So another
Speaker 1: this this Also, this is not something that's necessarily a
Speaker 1: replacement of a sense, but it's a very uh specific
Speaker 1: use of a sense. Echolocation which involves two things, right.
Speaker 1: It involves making a sound, a particular sound, and then
Speaker 1: being able to hear that sound, and from that base uh,
Speaker 1: the the making of the sound and hearing the echo
Speaker 1: come back, you are able to detect how far away
Speaker 1: something is from you. Uh. And there are certain animals
Speaker 1: that depend heavily upon echolocation in order to get around
Speaker 1: or to uh to catch food. Yeah. You think about
Speaker 1: the way bats hunt insects at night in the dark,
Speaker 1: or how about the way that ocean dwelling mammals hunt
Speaker 1: like dolphins and whales. A lot of those use echolocation
Speaker 1: to travel through the waves until it finds some delicious
Speaker 1: fish and then they say thanks for all the fish,
Speaker 1: and then they leave the earth. Uh. The bats use
Speaker 1: very very high pitched sounds that are beyond usually beyond
Speaker 1: the range of human hearing, so we're talking hypersonic type
Speaker 1: sounds that are uh, they're very high frequency. It also
Speaker 1: allows them to get incredible precision on on when they're
Speaker 1: hearing echoes back, which is why they're able to use
Speaker 1: it to locate something as small as an insect that's
Speaker 1: flying in the air, and they're even able to compensate
Speaker 1: for the Doppler effect, so that if they are flying
Speaker 1: toward an insect and they get that echo back, they're
Speaker 1: able to take into account this the fact that they
Speaker 1: are moving, the insect is moving, and still know where
Speaker 1: that insect is in relation to where they are, which
Speaker 1: is pretty cool when you think about it. That's that's
Speaker 1: a very complex sort of thing. Now, granted, this is
Speaker 1: not something that the bats are necessarily knowing they it's
Speaker 1: just this adaptation. Well, it goes into the way that
Speaker 1: obviously we don't know what it's like to be a
Speaker 1: bat or a dolphin. We can't be in that brain.
Speaker 1: But Bruce Wayne does. Whatever these animals are creating in
Speaker 1: their head, there's somehow using this information to create a
Speaker 1: model of reality that's pretty accurate the way that we
Speaker 1: do with our eyes. Even though it's not the only
Speaker 1: way to see. At least it's accurate enough to say
Speaker 1: food is right over there. I want that food. I'm
Speaker 1: going to go get it. Yeah, So yeah, that's interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: what's also interesting is that we have some some incidents
Speaker 1: of humans using a kind of echolocation to get around
Speaker 1: unaided echolocation. We'll talk about techno echolocation later on, but
Speaker 1: some people actually learn to do this without technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they make a noise and then they can hear the
Speaker 1: difference the noise the noise they're making it. It's supposed
Speaker 1: to be a consistent noise of some sort, even if
Speaker 1: they're singing a scale, it's their voice doing it, or
Speaker 1: if they're making a whistle noise or they're making a
Speaker 1: click there. They they know what the sound sounds like normally,
Speaker 1: and then they catch the echo as they get closer
Speaker 1: and closer to And so you have people who have
Speaker 1: vision impairments who have used this sort of technique and
Speaker 1: they're able to navigate things like hallways. But really anyone
Speaker 1: who's who's capable of hearing is able to do this.
Speaker 1: It's really just training your brain to to recognize the
Speaker 1: discrepancy exactly. I'd imagine you could never train it to
Speaker 1: nearly the level of tuning that it would be in
Speaker 1: like a dolphin or a back. We wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to produce nor hear the pitch of sounds that would
Speaker 1: give us that level of incredible detail, but we'd be
Speaker 1: able to tell things like if you're coming close to
Speaker 1: an obstacle or if something's coming towards you. So the
Speaker 1: example I saw online about how you could test this
Speaker 1: yourself is that if you have a friend that you trust,
Speaker 1: that part's important. But let's say your friend holds up
Speaker 1: a frying pan, uh in front of your face, and
Speaker 1: so first you just make make a noise like maybe
Speaker 1: your make clicking your tongue or something along those lines, uh,
Speaker 1: where there's nothing in front of you, and then your
Speaker 1: friend puts said frying pan in front of your face.
Speaker 1: You have your eyes closed. You can't tell otherwise that
Speaker 1: this is happening. When you'd make that clicking noise, you
Speaker 1: would hear the difference. And by learning that difference, by
Speaker 1: learning how that would sound different, you would know, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm approaching some sort of obstacle that's blocking some of
Speaker 1: the sound, that's making it sound different to me. It's
Speaker 1: a little different. It's not, like I said, not as
Speaker 1: precise as we're seeing in the animal world, but but
Speaker 1: still worse. Well, I mean, you know it's it's we
Speaker 1: We don't need to find insects with our voices for survivals.
Speaker 1: So we we have not. Most of us depend so
Speaker 1: heavily on vision that we haven't developed that skill set. Right.
Speaker 1: I've got another crazy one for you. How about chemo
Speaker 1: receptors in skin. So, so you mean like tasting with
Speaker 1: things other than our our our tongue are smelling things
Speaker 1: for them. That's exactly what I mean. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to taste things with my hands, but you do.
Speaker 1: You so do because then you'd be like kind of
Speaker 1: like a catfish. So we think that some fish might
Speaker 1: have chemo receptors on exterior skin surfaces. In other words,
Speaker 1: it's basically like having taste buds on your body. And
Speaker 1: there's a reason that we talk about fish there, because,
Speaker 1: especially when you live in the water, being able to
Speaker 1: detect what chemicals are passing through the water around you,
Speaker 1: or say lying along the bottom of a stream bed
Speaker 1: might be really important to helping you find food, find mates,
Speaker 1: find whatever it is. Yeah, however, for humans, just think
Speaker 1: of the door knob, guys, do I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: like thinking about door knobs to begin with. I'm not
Speaker 1: really germophobic. I I think you're being unfair here because
Speaker 1: the reason you don't want to taste door knobs is
Speaker 1: because you don't want to lick door knobs because you
Speaker 1: might be ingesting germs. But what if you could taste
Speaker 1: the door knob without necessarily getting all jeermany Joe Josh
Speaker 1: Clark uses the same podcast, Sweet, I do not want
Speaker 1: to taste that door knob. You're probably tasting his microphone
Speaker 1: right now. Oh that's that's pretty accurate. Okay. How about
Speaker 1: heat vision? That's another one. You mean, like Superman, where
Speaker 1: can zap stuff? No? No, no, I mean although we
Speaker 1: all know that space cats have eye lasers. A lot
Speaker 1: of comic book references for me today, Sorry, guys. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we can already sense heat in a certain way.
Speaker 1: We sense heat with our skin obviously feeling sort of
Speaker 1: intense temperature differences. And heat is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 1: It's it's just at a range that we cannot see
Speaker 1: with our eyeballs. Right. Well, yeah, so heat is thermal energy,
Speaker 1: and thermal energy any object with the temperature, so imagine
Speaker 1: something like a human body or a recently dead monster
Speaker 1: or so has suffered a terrible face. Everything is technically
Speaker 1: everything that is above absolute zero is technically radiating some
Speaker 1: form of heat. Even if it feels to us very cold.
Speaker 1: It just matters whate or not. It's radiating more heat
Speaker 1: than the ambient environmental temperature, right right, Well, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: it's emitting thermal radiation and those waves can be found
Speaker 1: on the infrared spectrum. So the infrared spectrum is made
Speaker 1: of longer wavelengths of light than the light that's normally
Speaker 1: visible to humans. So we can't normally see infrared, but
Speaker 1: if we could, we could basically see differences in temperature,
Speaker 1: like predator. So there you go, Predator. Some real animals, however,
Speaker 1: are basically already predator. Uh BoA's Pythons and snakes in
Speaker 1: the viper subfamily crotalin A, also known as pit vipers,
Speaker 1: are able to detect heat via infrared radiation. So these
Speaker 1: snakes have pit organs located between the eyes and the
Speaker 1: nostrils on their little snake faces. The organs consist of
Speaker 1: membranes that are sensitive to radiation on the infrared spectrum.
Speaker 1: So the pits help the snakes see the body heat
Speaker 1: of the prey and they can zero in to make
Speaker 1: a strike even in the darkness. That's that's really cool
Speaker 1: and scary, pretty intense. Yeah, So wait a minute, why
Speaker 1: don't we just normally see light on the infrared spectrum. Well,
Speaker 1: apparently there would be a conflict there. If we could
Speaker 1: see infrared light, apparently it would or whelm our eyes
Speaker 1: and we would be unable to see all the normal
Speaker 1: light that we need in order to navigate the day
Speaker 1: to day world where we're back to. Wouldn't stop screaming
Speaker 1: kind of territory. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. It'd be.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to use a different sense,
Speaker 1: it would be like our sense of hearing. If you
Speaker 1: went into a room where there were just multiple loud
Speaker 1: sources of noise and you were trying to concentrate on
Speaker 1: something someone was saying, and that's what your experience was
Speaker 1: all the time, it would be very difficult to ever
Speaker 1: hear anything. Yeah, okay, I got another one. This is
Speaker 1: crazy electro reception. I'm not going to make a spider
Speaker 1: Man joke. If you are a fan of Shark Week,
Speaker 1: you probably know about this one. This is the ability
Speaker 1: to sense electrical currents in one's environment. So sharks can
Speaker 1: do this. Certain fish can do this. It's common in
Speaker 1: uh animals that dwell in the water, typically seawater, which
Speaker 1: makes sense because even the water is resistant to electrical current.
Speaker 1: It's more conductive than air, especially seawater because as salt
Speaker 1: in it, and those ions make it easier for the
Speaker 1: electricity to travel. So sharks, for example, use electro reception
Speaker 1: organs called ampulated Lorenzini. These are little dots around the
Speaker 1: shark's face, around the base of the jaw that detected
Speaker 1: the movement of live prey and water via electrical signals.
Speaker 1: So the receptors are sensitive to tiny changes in voltage
Speaker 1: that are caused by say the heartbeat of a fish
Speaker 1: or the flapping muscle movement of efficious fins, and that
Speaker 1: that transmits its electricity through the water, and the sharks
Speaker 1: are really sensitive. Christen Conger wrote a good article about
Speaker 1: this for us to Works. She says in her article
Speaker 1: that sharks can sense changes in electrical current down to
Speaker 1: one billionth of a volt. That would be one nano volt.
Speaker 1: Well said, with authority, it's a really beautiful sense. I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit obsessed with this one. Some some baby
Speaker 1: sharks developed this before they're even born, and they can
Speaker 1: use the sense to avoid detection by possible predators that
Speaker 1: they'll be an. These little shark egg sact things and
Speaker 1: they'll instinctually hold still if they sense something big nearby. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not so useful if you're in an environment that is
Speaker 1: not electrically conductive. Right, So, could we use this, well,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll talk about that in a minute when we
Speaker 1: when we talk about technological amplification of senses. Uh So,
Speaker 1: one last thing I just wanted to talk about is
Speaker 1: that these ways of creating internal pictures of the world
Speaker 1: are useful because of the environments we live in here
Speaker 1: on Earth and because of the laws of physics more broadly,
Speaker 1: but just as one example, the wavelengths of light that
Speaker 1: we call the visible spectrum. So all the colors you
Speaker 1: can see with your eyes, they're just wavelengths. I mean,
Speaker 1: they could be any wavelengths, but it's good for us
Speaker 1: to see at those wavelengths because those are the wavelengths
Speaker 1: that penetrate our atmosphere. Radio frequencies also do, but a
Speaker 1: lot of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum don't make it
Speaker 1: down to the surface of the Earth, right, So those
Speaker 1: things coming down from the sunlight actually make it here.
Speaker 1: We can see them reflect off things, and that's why
Speaker 1: it's good for us to see those surfaces but what
Speaker 1: if we'd evolved on a world where the most abundant
Speaker 1: radiation from the sun was ultra violet? Or what if
Speaker 1: you could imagine a creature that could see radio waves.
Speaker 1: They'd go bonkers here because based upon all the WiFi, bluetooth,
Speaker 1: broadcast signals, not to mention just the natural radio waves
Speaker 1: that are emitted by stuff like stars and and other
Speaker 1: other sources. Uh, it'd probably a little overwhelming. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I'd imagine that, like the way
Speaker 1: we experienced light, they wouldn't see the waves themselves, but
Speaker 1: they'd see them reflected off of surfaces. Yeah, still would
Speaker 1: be pretty crazy, Yeah, totally. Okay, So let's talk body hacking. Okay, sure,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about let's say that I want to
Speaker 1: be more like one of these animals or a predator
Speaker 1: or something like that. I want to be a shark,
Speaker 1: I want to be a spider, I want to be
Speaker 1: a predator. All these things have things, because all the
Speaker 1: best things to be have thangs. Yeah, what what if
Speaker 1: I want to do? Actually, let's start with the cuter things,
Speaker 1: birds and bees. What if I want to be like
Speaker 1: a bird or a sea turtle or a bee and
Speaker 1: use a magnetic sense to make a model of reality
Speaker 1: in my head. Well, Joe, one thing you could do,
Speaker 1: though I don't recommend it, is to surgically implant a
Speaker 1: small permanent magnet on the tip of one of your fingers,
Speaker 1: preferably the ring finger on your non dominant hand, in
Speaker 1: case something should go terribly wrong and you lose all
Speaker 1: feeling in that finger. You talk as if you've read
Speaker 1: about people doing this, I, in fact have read about
Speaker 1: people doing this. So yeah, bio hackers also known as
Speaker 1: grinders or depending on where you're from, hogs or subways, um. So,
Speaker 1: bio hackers have been known to perform a little surgery
Speaker 1: on themselves or to have you know, a body modification
Speaker 1: person performance surgery. We should stress right now we're not
Speaker 1: advocating this, not at all, and it's generally illegal in
Speaker 1: most places. Yeah, because even body modification folks, it's not
Speaker 1: like they are necessarily trained in things like surgery. Uh
Speaker 1: and and most surgeons, most actual you know, surgical surgical
Speaker 1: doctors that you could go and visit and say a
Speaker 1: hospital or other office won't do these things because it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily considered ethical. So I don't know if there's
Speaker 1: no license to doctor who will do it, but I
Speaker 1: have found no evidence of one who will. Well, it's
Speaker 1: it's not generally deemed medically necessary, and the potential to
Speaker 1: do harm outweighs therefore the potential for good almost almost immediately. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where you say, look until
Speaker 1: there's some best practices that are established for this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. It's an unnecessary and unnecessarily risky endeavor. So
Speaker 1: but the idea is that you use a small permanent magnet,
Speaker 1: powerful permanent magnetic neodymium and neodymium being a prime example.
Speaker 1: Get a small magnet and implanted just under the skin,
Speaker 1: like I said, usually on the ring finger of the
Speaker 1: non dominant hand. You'd probably want to code it in
Speaker 1: some kind of nonreactive plastic coating like parallene, which is
Speaker 1: what they use to say, put a pacemaker in your body.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff in your body that could
Speaker 1: end up corroding various materials, or you could end up
Speaker 1: having an allergic reaction to stuff, or your body could
Speaker 1: just end up thinking of it as an infection and
Speaker 1: trying to find it off. But so, once once it's
Speaker 1: in there, what what does that what does that do alright?
Speaker 1: So well messes up your computer screen. Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: want to don't want to put your finger too close
Speaker 1: to any any screens that require that. So what it
Speaker 1: does is allows you to detect magnetic fields or electric fields,
Speaker 1: because we know there's that that electromagnetic forces right there.
Speaker 1: There's that close relationship between electric electric electricity, I guess
Speaker 1: I should say, and magnetism. So if you have a
Speaker 1: fluctuating electric field, then you're going to detect it whenever
Speaker 1: you come near it. If it's a static electric field,
Speaker 1: and you will detect it when you come into range,
Speaker 1: but then it would probably it would stop pulling. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean by detect, you mean you're you're
Speaker 1: you're going to feel the magnet, the magnet being pulled.
Speaker 1: It'll vibrate a little bit, depending upon what sort of
Speaker 1: magnetic or electric field you're coming into contact with, right,
Speaker 1: they say, with like big powerful electric fields, if it's
Speaker 1: direct current, you feel a tug. If it's alternating current,
Speaker 1: you feel a vibration. Yeah, they say that this is crazy.
Speaker 1: If you get near anything like say a microwave of
Speaker 1: it while it's turned on, so you'd be able to
Speaker 1: feel that of course, if you came into contact with
Speaker 1: any magnets you could you would feel the tug. If
Speaker 1: it was a powerful magnet, you could feel being stuck
Speaker 1: to it. Um. If it's a powerful enough electro magnet,
Speaker 1: like say in a m R I, you could suffer
Speaker 1: some serious damage. So that would be one thing you
Speaker 1: would have to let anyone know that you have this
Speaker 1: magnet in your body if you were to go in
Speaker 1: for like an m r I scan, because otherwise you
Speaker 1: could cause some pretty serious havoc inside the machine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the idea is that it extends our senses so
Speaker 1: that when you come into contact with these things, which
Speaker 1: normally we would be unaware of. Right, we would normally
Speaker 1: not notice it unless something on us reacted to it.
Speaker 1: Now we've got something. You could have something in you
Speaker 1: that would react to this, something that's particularly sensitive to
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. And not only that, but using
Speaker 1: the same technology, the same procedure of having a magnet
Speaker 1: implanted in your finger, you can pair that with other
Speaker 1: devices that are able to detect completely different types of
Speaker 1: UH data and and feel it. So, for example, let's
Speaker 1: say you've got a sensor that can pick up UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know let's say infrared. It's a sensor that
Speaker 1: can pick up infrared and it has a threshold, so
Speaker 1: anything over a certain amount that sensor generates enough electricity
Speaker 1: to activate an electro magnet. You also happen to have
Speaker 1: one of these magnets in your finger, so you're pairing
Speaker 1: this external device with the magnet in your finger. You
Speaker 1: move the external device around and whenever it detects heat
Speaker 1: that is above that threshold, it sends that signal and
Speaker 1: you feel it, so you now know if something is
Speaker 1: hot even if you're not close to it. Or another
Speaker 1: example would be echolocation, where it sends out an ultrasonic signal,
Speaker 1: it comes back and as you get closer and closer
Speaker 1: to an object, that sends pulses to an electro magnet,
Speaker 1: which again trigger the magnet that's in your fingers, so
Speaker 1: you can actually feel when you get closer to something
Speaker 1: without seeing it. So I've seen demonstrations of this where
Speaker 1: a person is sitting down at a table, they have
Speaker 1: a blindfold on, they've got one of these little devices,
Speaker 1: and they've got the magnet in their finger, and someone
Speaker 1: puts something down in front of them, like a box
Speaker 1: of cereal, and the and they're told that there is
Speaker 1: something on this table in front of you. You have
Speaker 1: to detect where it is without reaching out and trying
Speaker 1: to just grow up around. And so they would use
Speaker 1: this little ultrasonic echolocation device and point it and when
Speaker 1: they would hit where the cereal box was, it's, oh,
Speaker 1: it's right there, because I can feel it. I can
Speaker 1: feel the you know, from the sensor. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a two step process here, right. But I've seen
Speaker 1: it paired with a lot of different ways, And in fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of bio hackers say that the the ability
Speaker 1: to detect a magnetic field or an electric field is
Speaker 1: just that's just the tip of the iceberg if you
Speaker 1: pair it with these other technologies. Yeah, so one of
Speaker 1: the number one I think this is really cool in theory. Again,
Speaker 1: not endorsing the self surgery thing, yeah, but the idea
Speaker 1: of expanding your senses is really cool. The second thing, though,
Speaker 1: is it is interesting that what you're doing here is
Speaker 1: you're sort of repurposing part of one sense or a
Speaker 1: combination and of senses to give you new data. So
Speaker 1: you're still expanding your ability to build a mental picture
Speaker 1: of the outside world. But what you're doing is giving
Speaker 1: yourself an implant that uses your innate probably a combination
Speaker 1: of your sense of touch and your appropriate reception, your
Speaker 1: sense of where your finger is, and your feeling of
Speaker 1: movement within it to send that data to your brain.
Speaker 1: So it's a cognitive adaptation. You're using your thoughts. You're
Speaker 1: not adding You're not adding some brand new type of
Speaker 1: sensor that has to form a brand new kind of
Speaker 1: neural relationship with your brain for this to happen. What
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're just interpreting a new set of
Speaker 1: touch stimuli and you're applying that to a different, you know,
Speaker 1: a different experience. But it's not like you had to
Speaker 1: invent something new, like you had to figure out, oh, well,
Speaker 1: now I've got to figure out how my brain interprets magnets.
Speaker 1: It's not because it's not magnets. It's the sense of
Speaker 1: that sense of pressure. Yeah, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: a few more, and this will actually apply to pretty
Speaker 1: much all of them, I guess all of them. They're
Speaker 1: all talking about repurposing part of one sense to create
Speaker 1: new ways of modeling reality. They're not talking about creating
Speaker 1: a new sense that didn't exist before. Because Frankly, we
Speaker 1: just don't know enough about the brain to do that,
Speaker 1: and in most cases we don't understand enough about how
Speaker 1: we actually input that data in the first place. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's talk about another one, another potential sense. What
Speaker 1: about electro reception? Could you have electro reception like a shark?
Speaker 1: And I want to go ahead and say I don't
Speaker 1: really think so. That one's not so much on the radar,
Speaker 1: mainly because you don't want to live in the ocean, right,
Speaker 1: whole episode about living under the ocean. Yeah, but that
Speaker 1: was living in capsules. You you don't want to live
Speaker 1: in the water. I would get really pruny, fair play,
Speaker 1: fair play. That would be pruny, prunny landscape of badness,
Speaker 1: all right, escape of badness? All right? Well, anyway, so
Speaker 1: the sharks and other elector receptive animals live in water,
Speaker 1: and the air doesn't conduct electrical currents like seawater does
Speaker 1: the way we talked about. So do no land animals
Speaker 1: have this sense? I found evidence of one one land
Speaker 1: dwelling animal that uses electro reception. That's the Australian echidna
Speaker 1: orchidna kidna. Yeah, it's sort of sort of like a platypus,
Speaker 1: And here's how it works. It digs around in the
Speaker 1: wet top soil with its beak, which has electro receptors
Speaker 1: that detect the squigglings of earthworms somewhere down in that
Speaker 1: moist soil. Does that sound like a power up you want?
Speaker 1: I think? Uh? I think I could write an entire
Speaker 1: series about a superhero whose only power with the detection
Speaker 1: of earthworms, to root around in the ground with its nose.
Speaker 1: That's all he can do. It would be about as
Speaker 1: good as aqua man. Yeah, yeah, the lateral move. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: What about infrared sensing? I think this is a really
Speaker 1: cool one, and it's actually tied into some research that's
Speaker 1: good for other reasons. So we already talked about the
Speaker 1: natural infrared sensing of snakes, but it is possible to
Speaker 1: teach your brain to interpret infrared signals with the help
Speaker 1: of technology. So in researchers led by Duke University neurobiologist
Speaker 1: Miguel Nikolaylis published findings on a study that used a
Speaker 1: neural implant to bring infrared vision to mice, or maybe
Speaker 1: not vision, I don't know. It's probably something more like
Speaker 1: long range infrared touch yeah, and so the way it
Speaker 1: worked was the Duke scientists created an electronic infrared sensor,
Speaker 1: so that's just a standard mechanical infrared sensor external to
Speaker 1: the mouse's brain. It mounts on the forehead. Then they
Speaker 1: wired the device directly to the mouse's brain so the
Speaker 1: device can send electrical impulses down into the somato sensory cortex,
Speaker 1: which is the part of the mouse's brain that interprets
Speaker 1: tactile information like touch. Specifically, they said it was to
Speaker 1: the part that comes from the touch on the mouse's whiskers.
Speaker 1: So let's try it out. You you put a mouse
Speaker 1: in a contraption like this with its brain all wired up,
Speaker 1: and you put it in a test chamber with multiple ports,
Speaker 1: say ports A through D, and each one of these
Speaker 1: ports has the capability to light up with an infrared light,
Speaker 1: which is normally invisible to mice. It's invisible told mammals. Now,
Speaker 1: when the infrared light comes on into port, that port
Speaker 1: offers a sip of water as a reward if the
Speaker 1: mouse runs to that port. After a period of training,
Speaker 1: the mice were able to use the neural implant to
Speaker 1: quickly detect and find rewards based on infrared light that's
Speaker 1: invisible to their eyes, and that's pretty cool directly to
Speaker 1: the brain. So one interesting observation was that before the
Speaker 1: mice were trained, they reacted to the data coming from
Speaker 1: the implant by scratching at their faces like they were itching.
Speaker 1: So they interpret it literally as a physical sensation, something
Speaker 1: like a tickle on the face. Oh wow, because it
Speaker 1: was wired to that same part of their brain. So
Speaker 1: so they were like, I see this thing and it's
Speaker 1: making my face it yeah. And the people who who
Speaker 1: authored this study emphasized how this isn't limited just to infrared, say,
Speaker 1: or to this kind of part of the brain. It's
Speaker 1: generally a proof that hey, we could expand this. We
Speaker 1: could use technology to sense things and then send that
Speaker 1: data directly to the brain so you wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: rout it through some other part of the body or sense.
Speaker 1: And another one of the things about it is that
Speaker 1: they showed how you can hijack part of the brain
Speaker 1: two So in this case, the part of the brain
Speaker 1: that detects touch to detect a new type of data
Speaker 1: without destroying that part of the brain's natural ability. So
Speaker 1: the mice still had an intact sense of touch. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the case. They could still run around and detect
Speaker 1: where they were, you know, winds based on their whiskers,
Speaker 1: or if they were brushing against something that that was
Speaker 1: still fine. Sure, yeah, you could. You could partially hijack
Speaker 1: this sense without destroying its natural capabilities. So what's interesting
Speaker 1: to me is that we talked about in nature how
Speaker 1: birds see magnetic fields, or at least that's what that's
Speaker 1: the that's the prevailing theory, prevailing prevailing theory that they're
Speaker 1: seeing magnetic fields. And now we've got mice feeling infrared,
Speaker 1: and I would have put those, Uh, I would have
Speaker 1: switched those just just based upon like if I were again,
Speaker 1: if you weren't giving me all this information and you
Speaker 1: just told me, how do you how do you think
Speaker 1: they perceived this? Like was? It was the most analogous
Speaker 1: too for people. I would have gone with vision for
Speaker 1: infrared and feeling for magnetic fields. I wonder why they
Speaker 1: why they chose specifically the whisker touchy, Yeah, I'd suspect
Speaker 1: it had to do with the part that they the
Speaker 1: part of the brain that they understood the best. Probably
Speaker 1: if you were to put in, say the visual cortex,
Speaker 1: it might be that the mice just start hallucinating like crazy.
Speaker 1: You just have a mouse just tripping out, and that's
Speaker 1: that's not a very useful mouse. That's just pinky in
Speaker 1: the brain. Yeah, speaking of tripping, what about human echolocation
Speaker 1: using some sort of electronic device. Oh yeah, we mentioned
Speaker 1: that earlier. Well, that's real. People have created this. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about Spider Man. What is Spider Man's spidy sense.
Speaker 1: How does it work? Well? Magic? But no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not asking the mechanism. What's what's it do? It
Speaker 1: detects danger? Yeah, So, when when something is about to
Speaker 1: hit Spider Man upside the head, he gets a little
Speaker 1: early warning which allows him to use his amazing boosted
Speaker 1: reflexes to dodge all the way before said things smacks
Speaker 1: him upside the head. Right, So, when he's in the
Speaker 1: movie theater talking through the movie and people behind him
Speaker 1: start throwing soda bottles and stuff like that at him,
Speaker 1: he knows it's coming before you can tell from the
Speaker 1: little squiggly lines that come out from his head. That's
Speaker 1: the spidy sense. Yes, yeah, the exact mechanical causation of
Speaker 1: the Spider senses, I believe unknown in the Spider Verse
Speaker 1: spider spider man verse. It's not magic, it's science. The
Speaker 1: spader verse, the web slinging is science, spider science. But
Speaker 1: you might be able to simulate this with sound based
Speaker 1: at echolocation, or probably with with light based echolocation, also
Speaker 1: with like radar or something, but the specific example I
Speaker 1: want to talk about here is sound based. So a
Speaker 1: computer science grad student named Victor Mativitsi created a project
Speaker 1: called the Spider Sense Suit last year, and here's how
Speaker 1: it works. All over your body, so your legs, chest, back, arms,
Speaker 1: You've got little suit nodes connected by wires, and at
Speaker 1: each of these nodes are ultrasound microphones. They send out
Speaker 1: ultrasonic signals and then listen for them to bounce back
Speaker 1: at a distance of up to seventeen feet as an
Speaker 1: object comes closer. Tiny robotic arms at the nodes facing
Speaker 1: the object apply pressure to the skin, letting you know
Speaker 1: that you're near a solid piece of matter. So with
Speaker 1: the system like this, you could navigate hallways with your
Speaker 1: eyes closed or since people approaching you silently from behind.
Speaker 1: And apparently the creators used it to throw cardboard shuriken
Speaker 1: at attackers while blindfolded. So you can become a cardboard ninja.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, I love this idea. And you know,
Speaker 1: we call this haptic feedback. This idea that when you
Speaker 1: have some sort of sensory input and then you get
Speaker 1: this tactile output. Uh So video games use this all
Speaker 1: the time, like you just rumble controllers and a simple example,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of other ones. I've seen
Speaker 1: things like um chest plates and helmets that vibrate so
Speaker 1: that every time you're shot you get a little zap
Speaker 1: or or sometimes it's a bit of an impact, a thud.
Speaker 1: But in this case, it's one that's responding not to
Speaker 1: a an action within a video game, but rather getting
Speaker 1: closer to some sort of object because the ultrasonic signal
Speaker 1: has gone out, bounced back and indicated how far away
Speaker 1: that thing is and whether or not it's approaching or
Speaker 1: moving further away. Again, the Doppler effect comes into play there.
Speaker 1: And but but but ultrasonic waves are really quite precise. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can be measured really quite precisely, and in fact,
Speaker 1: and in fact, since there's so many nodes to that
Speaker 1: also that helps with the precision because you have presumably
Speaker 1: they're all sending out these signals and the time that
Speaker 1: it starts coming back. It can actually be pretty precise
Speaker 1: on the direction of the oncoming object, the person, or whatever.
Speaker 1: I guess. I guess we couldn't comment on exactly how
Speaker 1: precise this thing is because we haven't used it, but
Speaker 1: obviously it was it was precise enough that it was
Speaker 1: useful in these demonstrations. Yeah, it's pretty cool idea. I
Speaker 1: like the potential applications for it. Even if it never
Speaker 1: goes beyond say a curiosity, it's still pretty cool. Although
Speaker 1: you could see quote unquote, you could see potential applications
Speaker 1: that would be pretty useful. So yeah, I mean, our
Speaker 1: senses are pretty amazing. The more we learn about them,
Speaker 1: the more phenomenal they seem. Even even though it's kind
Speaker 1: of mundane because it's the stuff we live with day
Speaker 1: in and day out. What we are able to accomplish
Speaker 1: is pretty incredible when you think of all the chemicals
Speaker 1: were detecting, all the light we're able to interpret. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that we have to be satisfied with them.
Speaker 1: So I I do think that it's going to be
Speaker 1: pretty cool. We're going to find more and more ways
Speaker 1: in the future to create ways to augment these senses.
Speaker 1: Either to make them uh like our vision more even
Speaker 1: more keen, or perhaps being able to detect further outside
Speaker 1: the visit what's normally considered the visible spectrum. Maybe will
Speaker 1: be redefining what is detectable by human means in another
Speaker 1: decade or two. Who knows. I think one cool thing
Speaker 1: about this might apply to theoretical astrobiology, because if you're
Speaker 1: talking about the ways that we can expand human senses,
Speaker 1: you might also be coming up with cool ideas for
Speaker 1: how aliens might create models of the world. There's no
Speaker 1: reason to expect that they would use the same kind
Speaker 1: of sense as we do to create physical models of reality, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they might have an entirely different way of sensing their
Speaker 1: environments and interacting with them and and uh deriving meaning
Speaker 1: from things, which presents itself with lots of different scenarios,
Speaker 1: many of which I'm sure we will explore in science
Speaker 1: fiction down the road. Because the mind boggles, really, I mean,
Speaker 1: you could have an alien race that has a completely
Speaker 1: different construction of of what reality is based upon the
Speaker 1: the kinds of data that it can receive and interpret.
Speaker 1: It could be just as accurate and useful to them
Speaker 1: as ours is to us. It would just be alien,
Speaker 1: which is kind of cool. Well, anyway, that wraps up
Speaker 1: this discussion. If you guys out there have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: you should let us know. You can send us an email.
Speaker 1: The address is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or
Speaker 1: drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.
Speaker 1: The handle at all three locations is FW thinking and
Speaker 1: we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on
Speaker 1: this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking
Speaker 1: dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,