# Brainstorming new senses

What new senses would you like to have available to you?

Often when new technology first becomes widely available, the initial limits are in the collective imagination, not in the technology itself (case in point: the internet). New sensory channels have a huge potential because the brain can process senses much faster and more intuitively than most conscious thought processes.

There are a lot of recent "proof of concept" inventions that show that it is possible to create new sensory channels for humans with and without surgery. The most well known and simple example is an implanted magnet, which would alert you to magnetic fields (the trade-off being that you could never have an MRI). Cochlear implants are the most widely used human-created sensory channels (they send electrical signals directly to the nervous system, bypassing the ear entirely), but CIs are designed to emulate a sensory channel most people already have brain space allocated to. VEST is another example. Similar to CIs, VEST (versatile extra-sensory transducer) has 24 information channels, and uses audio compression to encode sound. Unlike CIs, they are not implanted in the skull but instead information is relayed through vibrating motors on the torso. After a few hours of training, deaf volunteers are capable of word recognition using the vibrations alone, and to do so without conscious processing. Much like hearing, the users are unable to describe exactly what components make a spoken word intelligible, they just understand the sensory information intuitively. Another recent invention being tested (with success) is BrainPort glasses, which send electrical signals through the tongue (which is one of the most sensitive organs on the body). Blind people can begin processing visual information with this device within 15 minutes, and it is unique in that it is not implanted. The sensory information feels like pop rocks at first before the brain is able to resolve it into sight. Niel Harbisson (who is colorblind) has custom glasses which use sound tones to relay color information. Belts that vibrate when facing north give people an sense of north. Bottlenose can be built at home and gives a very primitive sense of echolocation. As expected, these all work better if people start young as children. 

What are the craziest and coolest new senses you would like to see available using this new technology? I think VEST at least is available from Kickstarter and one of the inventors suggested that it could be that it could be programmed to transmit any kind of data. My initial ideas which I heard about this possibility are just are senses that some unusual people already have or expansions on current senses. I think the real game changers are going to be totally knew senses unrelated to our current sensory processing. Translating data into sensory information gives us access to intuition and processing speed otherwise unavailable. 

**My initial weak ideas:**

*   mass spectrometer (uses reflected lasers to determine the exact atomic makeup of anything and everything)
*   proximity meter (but I think you would begin to feel like you had a physical aura or field of influence)
*   WIFI or cell signal
*   perfect pitch and perfect north, both super easy and only need one channel of information (an smartwatch app?)
*   infrared or echolocation
*   GPS (this would involve some serious problem solving to figure out what data we should encode given limited channels, I think it could be done with 4 or 8 channels each associated with a cardinal direction)

**Someone working with VEST suggested:**

*   compress global twitter sentiments into 24 channels. Will you begin to have an intuitive sense of global events?
*   encode stockmarket data. Will you become an intuitive super-investor?
*   encode local weather data (a much more advanced version of "I can feel it's going to rain in my bad knee)

**Some resources for more information:**

*   https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324375300/vest-a-sensory-substitution-neuroscience-project
*   http://www.radiolab.org/story/seeing-tongues/
*   http://www.ted.com/talks/neil\_harbisson\_i\_listen\_to_color?language=en
*   http://www.fastcompany.com/3001309/biohackers-and-diy-cyborgs-clone-silicon-valley-innovation
*   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X1mry35ykQ

More?