Our Two Cents On More Senses

And I'm not trying to get all philosophical like what is reality or anything like that. No, I'm trying to comment actually on the nature of the way we perceive. And I'm not saying that your eyes don't give you accurate information about the world, because they do a pretty good job of creating a model of reality that's useful for us. All our brain messes it up a little

bit in translation, but sure, yeah, yeah sometimes. But what I'm talking about is that the model of reality created by light through our eyes, as interpreted by our brains, is not the only way to create an accurate model of the physical world. Rights necessarily limited. I mean, when we talk about the visible spectrum of light, that immediately tells you that there is a spectrum that is not

visible to us. So if we were able to see the entire spectrum of light, the world would look very different. So knowing that there are entire sections of light, and that's just one of our senses, right, We've got plenty of senses. We're gonna be talking about this episode of our primaries. It's one of those ones that's easy to talk about. It's it means that our perception of the world around us is by necessity limited, and that there's stuff going on all over the place that we just

cannot even perceive. Yeah, we've got only a small wedge of any given spectrum of stuff that we can take in by our senses. Yeah. Well, what you bring up there is that there are ways of creating models of reality that don't even necessarily use light. Right, they don't use electromagnetic radiation like you could use sound, or you

could maybe interpret the world in terms of chemicals. Right, if you had really chemo receptors, like maybe a very strong sense of smell could actually let you determine the relative locations of objects around you exactly. So in this episode, we wanted to explore the idea of augmenting our senses, perhaps extending our senses so that we have new ones beyond the ones we already have, so not just boosting the ones we have already, the ones that everyone is

familiar with. Are are familiar with, and you can use a telescope to see farther that's that's a no brain or you could use uh, you know, other other technology to allow you to see things that you normally couldn't see. For example, night vision goggles allow you to see at night, and we're gonna talk a little bit about some other technologies that might allow that sort of thing too, in

various ways. Basically, we want to focus on the eventual possibility of radically augmenting the way we create models of the physical world with our brains. So I guess we should start by talking about the senses we already have. And one of the cool facts about our bodies is that you have way more senses than you realize or

probably realized. Well, it's more than just those five senses that we all learned about and say kindergarten, right, Although some argue that these other senses will be talking about somehow are wrapped up in one or more senses. So it all depends upon who who's doing the talking. Right. In some cases you have someone saying, no, there are no x number of senses that are way more than five, and other people would say, well, let's be fair, three or four of the ones you mentioned are really wrapped

up in the five five big ones. But it all is ongoing debate, and it again depends really from your point of view. But yes, it is more complicated than just saying, what is a site? Smell? There's also what that? There's a taste, there's that touch and hearing. Right, let's talk the big five, all right, what is site? Okay, that's that's seeing. It's also no, I know that it's also does it Workalmo exception? That's what it's also called Falmo exception? That it sells in your eyes that are

that are sensitive to light. Yeah, yeah, and so and so yeah, to photons, right, and so they absorbed photons and send a signal to your brain and tell it some stuff. Yea, the brain. The brain actually does a lot of the work here. So we've got essentially photo receptors. So kind of similar to what you would think of in any kind of light sensor. It's it's the organic equivalent to that. So you have these photoreceptors, you've got

rods and cones. They are able to do different things. Um, and the number that you have will determine what kind of site you have based on from organism to organism, because different organisms have different arrays. Right, So something like a bird of prey has much keener sight than say, a human being does. Other animals may have vision that is not nearly as strong as what a human being has, but at any rate, we have these photoreceptor cells that

can detect light that's coming. They're able to see these visible images from the visible light spectrum, lights bouncing off of stuff right into our eyes. That sends the little electrical impulses to our brain, which then can interpret it and turn that into what we consider images. Yeah, and the way things look to us really are just ways

our brain makes sense of different pieces of data. So like when you see two different colors, the the actual physical data difference there is that you've got different wavelengths of light coming into your eyes. Yeah, which is why I blame everybody else for saying I'm not devastatingly handsome, because it's really how they're constructing me in their brains, not me. It's nothing. They don't realize how green you are. Yeah, it's uh, it's a constant source of irritation. But no, no,

so that. But this again, this kind of illustrates this idea, and not to get again to philosophical or metaphysical, but this idea that a lot of what we consider reality is this construct that's happening in our minds. It's it's our brains being able to interpret all the information, the data that's coming in. It's making sense of it. It's not that the data doesn't reflect something real, but the way we put it together is a simulation going on

in the brain. Yeah, yeah, so interesting there. Next, we've got in our our notes here we have smell the alpha conception. That's just one way of spelling it. I think it's old facco exception, all faccoception, there's all Well, there's actually three or four different spellings of it, and it all depends upon the spelling. There's some that have no O in it. Disclaimer. Now, a lot of the single word names for some of these senses have different

spell things and stuff. So don't write in correcting us. We know right right, we just don't know how to say them. So that's that part you can write in about you don't know how to say this. Yes, what happens in your nose? All right? You got these receptors, so molecular receptors in your nose that think of them as sort of it's like a key and lock situation.

You have these receptors that bind with certain moleculear molecular shapes, right, So when those molecules make contact with those receptors, then you have a signal sent to the brain that says AD that is X smell. So you have hundreds of different types of receptors in your in your nose, joe uh, in any given persons, if any given persons knows. Now, granted, if you were to look at say, other animals, they have maybe a wider range and a lot more of them.

Dogs have like two twenty million of these receptor cells, not different types, but in across the various range of types, And so the number determines how well you can smell, how how well you can detect an odor to no matter how faint the smell might be like how little of that molecule might be in the atmosphere. Maybe how

little of a difference you can tell? Yeah, yeah, and then so yeah, the kinds that we have, the different molecules which represent different smells can bind to those different receptors. That sends the signal to our brain very much the way the light can makes a nerve impulse go to our brain and our brain interprets it. So when you stop and smell the roses, the molecules you're inhaling are binding too specific receptors in your nasal passages. Essentially, we're

talking like little neurons firing off. Let's talk about a related sense, taste, Taste. Yeah, taste and smell are very closely related. In fact, taste and smell together are what allows us to detect flavor. Right, Because taste and flavor are two different things, a lot of us kind of equate the two. Sure, but um, I mean that's the reason if, for example, you've ever been sick and noticed that food tastes very different when your nose is stuffed up,

this is why, right, exactly. Yeah, And there are so many times where I've been sick and there's certain things that the tastes are very simple or the flavors are very simple. I should say the flavors are very simple, and therefore the taste is not that different, and I go with it. So something like tomato soup or chicken noodle soup tend to have very simple flavors and so

you don't lose a whole lot in translation. Well, it's also your your tongue is really good at receiving certain chemicals, like, for example, salt is something that's hard to smell but very easy to taste, and so that's something that that's why salty food like like chicken broth is is kind of fine for for it doesn't taste that weird, right, Right, So, like you were saying, we have these sensory receptors that buying two very specific types of molecules very much kind

of like the smell. In this case, you have the bay taste, which include these sweet, better sour, salty, and then oh mommy or savory. Yeah, so this is these smell and taste would both be sort of a form of chemo seption, right, sensing chemicals exactly. Yeah. So this is where with a site, we've got light when you talk about hearing or touch, you're talking about actual physical experiences.

Because sound a sound is sound is motion. Really, it's it's motion of molecules in the air that are colliding

with each other. If there weren't that motion, for example, if you were in the space in a vacuum, then you wouldn't hear anything because there'll be nothing to move and therefore nothing to stimulate your your sense of hearing, because your sense of hearing depends upon little tiny follicles, follicle like structures that vibrate when they come into contact with these moving molecules, that then continue to send signals

further on. Like in human ears, we have these delicate bones that then end up pressing against uh kind of a chamber that's filled with fluid that has other little cilia type hairs in it sounds beautiful, yeah, And and the motion, the motion of the fluid within that chamber moves the cilia, which then send the electrical signals to your brain, which you then interpret as sound. A lot of a lot of similar things here. Your your favorite music is really just all hairs in fluid. Fluid and fluid,

by the way, is the name of my guar cover band. Yeah, so don't steal it. Okay, what about touch, the last one in the big five? Yeah, tect the reception. Okay, so we're talking about neural receptors that are along things like under your skin, hair follicles, another good example. This

is mostly detecting changes in pressure. So when you press up against something that those changes in pressure, what you detect that ends up turning to these again nerve impulses that get sent to your central nervous system and then get interpreted by Mr. Braining as Oh that's what that is? Why Mr Brain? Why not brain or mrs brain? Really? How about dr brain? Dr brain? A dr brain? My brain isn't that smart most days? Right? Okay? How about this though? Did you know you've got senses that don't

even make the top five? We we alluded to this earlier. How about this one, which I think is really cool. Everybody sort of knows they have it, but they don't think to distinguish it. It's called Approprioception comes from approprio, the idea of one's own sense, yes, sense of one's own body, as in, you are you know where your body parts are in relation to each other, even without other senses getting in the way, right, try a little experiment here. Okay, close your eyes and clap your hands.

I hit the mic. No, but probably most to the time, you can do this. Why can you do this? Why can you see? You can tell where your hands are in relationship to each other without looking at them. Yeah, yeah, it's this, it's this sense, this ability for us to uh to figure out where our body parts are. Another example one that's commonly given in in lecture halls when they talk about the source of stuff or just even

just grade school, that kind of thing. Close your eyes and attempt to touch your own nose, and that again shows that you are aware of the position of where your nose is, where your finger is in relation to the nose, even while it's moving and then ending up someplace. You're able to process all of that without any sort

of visual stimulation. Right. If you've taken a drug or had an injury that has impaired your sense of appropriate reception, you might have trouble doing these things without looking at what you're doing. Sure. Yeah, so that's a pretty cool one, this idea of uh, you know. And and again it's one of those things where do you call it a sense and there's some people who argue about the sense. I think so too. But Joe, there are people who don't. I'm not saying that I don't Joe, don't get offended.

I don't know I think that anyone who's I mean, it's you. You juggle, Jonathan, and and and that's kind of how you how you make that happen. You have to know where your hands are without looking at Yeah, you can actually get to a point and once you get used to it, you can get to a point where you can maintain eye contact with other people and have a conversation and still continue to juggle. It's easier for me to to do it that way than to actually watch what I'm doing. If I watch what I'm doing,

I freak out and drop everything nice, humble, where yell. Look. I don't juggle a lot, but when I do, it's on fire and it's sharp. Speaking of things that are on fire and sharp, how about no susception? A sense of pain? Yeah, this is a sense of pain, which people believe is actually independent from your sense of touch, So you use different it's a different neural system exactly in this case. Pain comes in various varieties. Anyone who's

been fortunate enough to experience these knows them well. If you've juggled flaming machetes, yeah, since you can. You can divide these into pain that you sense along your skin, pain that is in your your joints or your bones, and pain that's in your internal organs. Um. I'm sure we've all experienced these to some degree or another. Pain is essentially the body's way of a detecting a threat and telling you, hey, you should probably get away from that.

Something is getting damaged, so stop what you're doing and don't do it anymore. Right. So, Now, obviously there are some types of injuries that end up impairing this. For example, if you were to suffer a truly serious burn, talking like third degree burn, then it can be so bad that it ends up frying the destroying so then you could end up not feeling the pain until it's really a terrible injury. But in general, this is an effective warning system. It really gives you a an incentive to

stop doing whatever it is that's causing the problem. This is also a sense that can be impaired on its own, and people can be unable to feel certain types of pain, and this can actually be dangerous. It sounds like a cool thing, but it's not something you want, right because if you are unable to feel pain, then you also may be unaware if you are suffering a type of injury. You might be leaning against a hot stove and burning your skin and you don't even know, right, or you

could be freezing, you know, it's another temperature. Temperature sensing is a little different from pain sensing, but because we also have that is our their most their most sception. But but it can also lead to sensing pain, depending upon if it's reaching a yeah, I have a question, Sure, what's the sense that lets me know whether or not I'm upside down? Equiliberal exception, which is that's that's when you uh, that's more to do with that inner ear

fluid of yours. Yes, yeah, your woe is more of a matrixception. Equilibrium was an excellent movie and very similar to the Matrix. I wouldn't call that an excellent movie the matrix anyway. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna have a nerd fight when we get out of this one. Equilibrio reception. Alright, so the tune into our past nerd fights. We keep we keep threatening to do that, and who knows, maybe one day that will happen. Uh, equilibrio reception. Yeah, this

is the sense of balance. You're You're right, it is, Lauren. It does involve the inner ear because partially partially yeah, because we're we're talking about being able to detect things like angular momentum and acceleration, linear momentum and acceleration, and being able to to maintain our sense of balance even as we move around. I mean, anyone who has ever just I mean just just being able to walk like you need that sense of balance in order to be

able to do that. If if you were only standing perfectly still in the same orientation for your entire life, wouldn't be so important. But we like to move around, and we encounter environments that are not always perfectly level or perfectly stationary, and so obviously we need to have that sense of balance to be able to to navigate that. Of course, the cool thing about that is you're actually not detecting movement. You're detecting acceleration or deceleration, because we're

always moving on the Earth and we don't feel that. Yes, well, we're used to it. If we were, if we were feeling the rotation and and the revolution of the earth around the sun. We probably never stopped screaming, all right, good, good point, Jonathan. Just think we'd be like, I can't do anything else because I'm too business. There's so many good reasons to never stop screaming. Oh my goodness, gracious. Okay, but yeah, there are other senses that we could talk about.

You know, there's your sense of hunger, there's your sense of thirst. There's senses that we have internally that relate to various types of experiences we could have. Some would argue that some of them are related to things like temperature or pain. It all depends upon again, who's doing the talking, right, Yeah, and I guess there are some we we still might have questions about, Like does it make sense to call chronoception the sense of the passage of time a sense? Is that a sense? Or is

that yeah? Or is that just a short term and long term memory interaction. Yeah, it's the way that we codify, especially considering that our memories are are very very very fallible, right that that, uh, we're malleable or both malleables. And yeah, it's an even better way of putting it. Lauren because as we well, it is. I would call it ductile. I call it plastic, all right. At any rate, Look, Joe, you're very smart too. I don't I don't mean to,

I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Stuff. I love you both, all right, You're both my favorite so anyway, but yeah, yeah, memory is malleable. Memory can change. We can We've known this, like we know that I witness testimony in court cases, while it tends to bear a lot of weight among jurors, is not terribly reliable because our memories are not not even close to reliable. Okay, I want to get to other senses, and by other I mean beyond human senses.

So these are senses that you might find in other organisms, but not in human beings. Well, you might find them in some very small way in human beings, but not in a really appreciable sense, not in a way that would be of any real use to the average person. Although we have some exceptions with a couple of these, the first one we want to talk about, magneto reception, might be different. This is how you are able to sense X Men comic books, Magneto reception or magneto reception.

Magneto reception or whatever you want to say. It's the way an organism senses magnetic fields. This is one that I think there's some controversy over the extent to which this is present in humans. But we don't have a

very strong of magneto reception, if we have any at all. Yeah, there's some people who argue that if you were to say, live near power lines where you have a lot of alternating current, that could end up making you not feel well, which would suggest that there would be some sort of magneto reception mechanism going on there, But double blind studies

don't seem to bear that out yet. I mean, mostly the research that I've read has suggested that in many organisms, um, and end result of being exposed to magnetic fields is a subproduction of calcium ions which which can which can affect your your your overall health and well being. Um. But that's like super not tested research, I mean, and it's also not something that you would necessarily like detect the presence of a magnetic field. You'd be affected by

the presence, right. Well, another thing that might be there is like, well, what if humans can use some in a sort of very subcon just magnetic information to help them navigate. Like people who are good at finding their way around, there are some animals who can seriously do that really well, yeah, like like uncannily for reals. I mean, this is what allows birds that migrate to in some cases migrate from the north pole to the south pole

every year, right, ridiculous. Well, it's because the Earth generates its own magnetic field. And if you know that, well maybe not. No, let's just let's not talk about cognition. But you're a bird that needs to go north at a certain time of the year, needs to go south at a different time of the year, and you have something going on in your brain and nervous system that that triggers that instinct. Okay, now is the time to

follow this magnetic signal? Right there? As I recall in the novel version of Jurassic Park, actually the dinosaurs yeah, and so they align themselves with the magnetic fields because and which proved one of the scientists theory, and he got all excited about it even as he was also about to dinosaurs. Yeah, alright, So how does it work in birds? Uh? Research indicates that that it's vision based and light dependent. Um that that birds can only orient

themselves magnetically if blue wavelengths of light are present. Um that the hypothesis here again this has not proven, is that birds see magnetic fields perhaps is as like dark or bright spots in their vision that move in pattern as the bird scans a scene. Uh, which is also which also falls in line with the way that we watch birds behave when they're when they're migrating. That's pretty cool. So I remember reading about this when I was writing

the video script. Is this cool idea that birds could actually see the magnetic fields like a grid over the vision that they have of normal light reflective, which is pretty cool. Like I would have I would have first imagined it to be more of a sense of touch, just just if I were thinking of this without any extra without the information here, If you had just told me, how do you think it happens? I would have thought, Oh,

it's probably some sort of feeling thing. It wouldn't have occurred to me that it was a visual possibly a visual thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They think it might have to do with like the spins of entangled electrons and molecule pairs inside the bird's eyes. I mean, I mean, if you want to dumb it down for everything. But yeah, I mean obviously they are not. The birds are not the only animals that have used magnetic fields to help navigate. No,

what about bees? Yeah, yeah, well there's there's lots. There's salmon, sea turtles, spotted newts, lobsters, and fruit flies. I'll also do this. But but bees are a really interesting example because there's been a lot of research done into both bees and birds actually in the past decade or so. Um and yeah, bees can even be trained to respond in certain ways if they send a magnetic field training bees. I want to do that so much. Um. I love bees. Okay, So,

so Halo player accurate. Um. So, researchers think that that the sense works like this. So, so, the bees produce an iron oxide called called magnetite in their bodies, and that magnetite gets stored in nanoparticle form inside a type of cell called a trophosyte um. And in the presence of a magnetic field, the particles either group together or move apart. And and at this size of particle that the process is called super paramagnetism. That's your word of

the day in case you ever need that one. Um, good, good ten cent word. But so these these changes in particle size trigger the release of those calcium ions that I was talking about earlier, and they react with other stuff in the cell and initiate this this neural response. Interesting and also, of course, as I see here, we've we've got a little note about bug senses that go beyond the magneto reception and also just into other peculiarities

of their site. Yeah yeah, um so so bees, butterflies and law of other insects can see polarized light, which is not a thing that humans can see. It means that they can navigate by the sun's position even when it's cloudy. Um. They think that it comes from a certain type of ibit. Inside of insects come compound eyes because most insects have several pairs of eyes, and and so that the compound ones have lots of little repeating parts,

and some of them contain these specialized photo receptors. I want to I'm going to try and say the word. I didn't look it up, So amatidia sounds great to me. That's that's that's the name of the ibit. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And then it's my favorite ibit. So another this this Also, this is not something that's necessarily a replacement of a sense, but it's a very uh specific use of a sense. Echolocation which involves two things, right.

It involves making a sound, a particular sound, and then being able to hear that sound, and from that base uh, the the making of the sound and hearing the echo come back, you are able to detect how far away something is from you. Uh. And there are certain animals that depend heavily upon echolocation in order to get around or to uh to catch food. Yeah. You think about the way bats hunt insects at night in the dark, or how about the way that ocean dwelling mammals hunt

like dolphins and whales. A lot of those use echolocation to travel through the waves until it finds some delicious fish and then they say thanks for all the fish, and then they leave the earth. Uh. The bats use very very high pitched sounds that are beyond usually beyond the range of human hearing, so we're talking hypersonic type

sounds that are uh, they're very high frequency. It also allows them to get incredible precision on on when they're hearing echoes back, which is why they're able to use it to locate something as small as an insect that's flying in the air, and they're even able to compensate for the Doppler effect, so that if they are flying toward an insect and they get that echo back, they're able to take into account this the fact that they are moving, the insect is moving, and still know where

that insect is in relation to where they are, which is pretty cool when you think about it. That's that's a very complex sort of thing. Now, granted, this is not something that the bats are necessarily knowing they it's just this adaptation. Well, it goes into the way that obviously we don't know what it's like to be a bat or a dolphin. We can't be in that brain.

But Bruce Wayne does. Whatever these animals are creating in their head, there's somehow using this information to create a model of reality that's pretty accurate the way that we do with our eyes. Even though it's not the only way to see. At least it's accurate enough to say food is right over there. I want that food. I'm going to go get it. Yeah, So yeah, that's interesting. Now, what's also interesting is that we have some some incidents of humans using a kind of echolocation to get around

unaided echolocation. We'll talk about techno echolocation later on, but some people actually learn to do this without technology. Yeah, they make a noise and then they can hear the difference the noise the noise they're making it. It's supposed to be a consistent noise of some sort, even if they're singing a scale, it's their voice doing it, or if they're making a whistle noise or they're making a

click there. They they know what the sound sounds like normally, and then they catch the echo as they get closer and closer to And so you have people who have vision impairments who have used this sort of technique and they're able to navigate things like hallways. But really anyone who's who's capable of hearing is able to do this. It's really just training your brain to to recognize the discrepancy exactly. I'd imagine you could never train it to nearly the level of tuning that it would be in

like a dolphin or a back. We wouldn't be able to produce nor hear the pitch of sounds that would give us that level of incredible detail, but we'd be able to tell things like if you're coming close to an obstacle or if something's coming towards you. So the example I saw online about how you could test this yourself is that if you have a friend that you trust,

that part's important. But let's say your friend holds up a frying pan, uh in front of your face, and so first you just make make a noise like maybe your make clicking your tongue or something along those lines, uh, where there's nothing in front of you, and then your friend puts said frying pan in front of your face. You have your eyes closed. You can't tell otherwise that this is happening. When you'd make that clicking noise, you

would hear the difference. And by learning that difference, by learning how that would sound different, you would know, Oh, I'm approaching some sort of obstacle that's blocking some of the sound, that's making it sound different to me. It's a little different. It's not, like I said, not as precise as we're seeing in the animal world, but but still worse. Well, I mean, you know it's it's we We don't need to find insects with our voices for survivals. So we we have not. Most of us depend so

heavily on vision that we haven't developed that skill set. Right. I've got another crazy one for you. How about chemo receptors in skin. So, so you mean like tasting with things other than our our our tongue are smelling things for them. That's exactly what I mean. So I don't want to taste things with my hands, but you do. You so do because then you'd be like kind of like a catfish. So we think that some fish might have chemo receptors on exterior skin surfaces. In other words,

it's basically like having taste buds on your body. And there's a reason that we talk about fish there, because, especially when you live in the water, being able to detect what chemicals are passing through the water around you, or say lying along the bottom of a stream bed might be really important to helping you find food, find mates, find whatever it is. Yeah, however, for humans, just think of the door knob, guys, do I don't. I don't like thinking about door knobs to begin with. I'm not

really germophobic. I I think you're being unfair here because the reason you don't want to taste door knobs is because you don't want to lick door knobs because you might be ingesting germs. But what if you could taste the door knob without necessarily getting all jeermany Joe Josh Clark uses the same podcast, Sweet, I do not want to taste that door knob. You're probably tasting his microphone right now. Oh that's that's pretty accurate. Okay. How about

heat vision? That's another one. You mean, like Superman, where can zap stuff? No? No, no, I mean although we all know that space cats have eye lasers. A lot of comic book references for me today, Sorry, guys. Okay, so we can already sense heat in a certain way. We sense heat with our skin obviously feeling sort of intense temperature differences. And heat is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's it's just at a range that we cannot see

with our eyeballs. Right. Well, yeah, so heat is thermal energy, and thermal energy any object with the temperature, so imagine something like a human body or a recently dead monster or so has suffered a terrible face. Everything is technically everything that is above absolute zero is technically radiating some form of heat. Even if it feels to us very cold.

It just matters whate or not. It's radiating more heat than the ambient environmental temperature, right right, Well, whatever it is, it's emitting thermal radiation and those waves can be found on the infrared spectrum. So the infrared spectrum is made of longer wavelengths of light than the light that's normally visible to humans. So we can't normally see infrared, but if we could, we could basically see differences in temperature,

like predator. So there you go, Predator. Some real animals, however, are basically already predator. Uh BoA's Pythons and snakes in the viper subfamily crotalin A, also known as pit vipers, are able to detect heat via infrared radiation. So these snakes have pit organs located between the eyes and the nostrils on their little snake faces. The organs consist of membranes that are sensitive to radiation on the infrared spectrum.

So the pits help the snakes see the body heat of the prey and they can zero in to make a strike even in the darkness. That's that's really cool and scary, pretty intense. Yeah, So wait a minute, why don't we just normally see light on the infrared spectrum. Well, apparently there would be a conflict there. If we could see infrared light, apparently it would or whelm our eyes and we would be unable to see all the normal light that we need in order to navigate the day

to day world where we're back to. Wouldn't stop screaming kind of territory. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. It'd be. You know, if you want to use a different sense, it would be like our sense of hearing. If you went into a room where there were just multiple loud sources of noise and you were trying to concentrate on something someone was saying, and that's what your experience was all the time, it would be very difficult to ever hear anything. Yeah, okay, I got another one. This is

crazy electro reception. I'm not going to make a spider Man joke. If you are a fan of Shark Week, you probably know about this one. This is the ability to sense electrical currents in one's environment. So sharks can do this. Certain fish can do this. It's common in uh animals that dwell in the water, typically seawater, which makes sense because even the water is resistant to electrical current.

It's more conductive than air, especially seawater because as salt in it, and those ions make it easier for the electricity to travel. So sharks, for example, use electro reception organs called ampulated Lorenzini. These are little dots around the shark's face, around the base of the jaw that detected the movement of live prey and water via electrical signals.

So the receptors are sensitive to tiny changes in voltage that are caused by say the heartbeat of a fish or the flapping muscle movement of efficious fins, and that that transmits its electricity through the water, and the sharks are really sensitive. Christen Conger wrote a good article about this for us to Works. She says in her article that sharks can sense changes in electrical current down to one billionth of a volt. That would be one nano volt.

Well said, with authority, it's a really beautiful sense. I'm a little bit obsessed with this one. Some some baby sharks developed this before they're even born, and they can use the sense to avoid detection by possible predators that they'll be an. These little shark egg sact things and they'll instinctually hold still if they sense something big nearby. Wow. Yeah, not so useful if you're in an environment that is

not electrically conductive. Right, So, could we use this, well, we'll we'll talk about that in a minute when we when we talk about technological amplification of senses. Uh So, one last thing I just wanted to talk about is that these ways of creating internal pictures of the world are useful because of the environments we live in here on Earth and because of the laws of physics more broadly, but just as one example, the wavelengths of light that

we call the visible spectrum. So all the colors you can see with your eyes, they're just wavelengths. I mean, they could be any wavelengths, but it's good for us to see at those wavelengths because those are the wavelengths that penetrate our atmosphere. Radio frequencies also do, but a lot of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum don't make it down to the surface of the Earth, right, So those things coming down from the sunlight actually make it here.

We can see them reflect off things, and that's why it's good for us to see those surfaces but what if we'd evolved on a world where the most abundant radiation from the sun was ultra violet? Or what if you could imagine a creature that could see radio waves. They'd go bonkers here because based upon all the WiFi, bluetooth, broadcast signals, not to mention just the natural radio waves that are emitted by stuff like stars and and other

other sources. Uh, it'd probably a little overwhelming. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I'd imagine that, like the way we experienced light, they wouldn't see the waves themselves, but they'd see them reflected off of surfaces. Yeah, still would be pretty crazy, Yeah, totally. Okay, So let's talk body hacking. Okay, sure, so we're talking about let's say that I want to be more like one of these animals or a predator or something like that. I want to be a shark, I want to be a spider, I want to be

a predator. All these things have things, because all the best things to be have thangs. Yeah, what what if I want to do? Actually, let's start with the cuter things, birds and bees. What if I want to be like a bird or a sea turtle or a bee and use a magnetic sense to make a model of reality

in my head. Well, Joe, one thing you could do, though I don't recommend it, is to surgically implant a small permanent magnet on the tip of one of your fingers, preferably the ring finger on your non dominant hand, in case something should go terribly wrong and you lose all feeling in that finger. You talk as if you've read about people doing this, I, in fact have read about people doing this. So yeah, bio hackers also known as

grinders or depending on where you're from, hogs or subways, um. So, bio hackers have been known to perform a little surgery on themselves or to have you know, a body modification person performance surgery. We should stress right now we're not advocating this, not at all, and it's generally illegal in most places. Yeah, because even body modification folks, it's not

like they are necessarily trained in things like surgery. Uh and and most surgeons, most actual you know, surgical surgical doctors that you could go and visit and say a hospital or other office won't do these things because it's not necessarily considered ethical. So I don't know if there's no license to doctor who will do it, but I have found no evidence of one who will. Well, it's it's not generally deemed medically necessary, and the potential to

do harm outweighs therefore the potential for good almost almost immediately. Yeah, it's one of those things where you say, look until there's some best practices that are established for this sort of thing. It's an unnecessary and unnecessarily risky endeavor. So but the idea is that you use a small permanent magnet, powerful permanent magnetic neodymium and neodymium being a prime example. Get a small magnet and implanted just under the skin, like I said, usually on the ring finger of the

non dominant hand. You'd probably want to code it in some kind of nonreactive plastic coating like parallene, which is what they use to say, put a pacemaker in your body. There's a lot of stuff in your body that could end up corroding various materials, or you could end up having an allergic reaction to stuff, or your body could just end up thinking of it as an infection and trying to find it off. But so, once once it's in there, what what does that what does that do alright?

So well messes up your computer screen. Yeah, you don't want to don't want to put your finger too close to any any screens that require that. So what it does is allows you to detect magnetic fields or electric fields, because we know there's that that electromagnetic forces right there. There's that close relationship between electric electric electricity, I guess I should say, and magnetism. So if you have a fluctuating electric field, then you're going to detect it whenever

you come near it. If it's a static electric field, and you will detect it when you come into range, but then it would probably it would stop pulling. Well, I mean, I mean by detect, you mean you're you're you're going to feel the magnet, the magnet being pulled. It'll vibrate a little bit, depending upon what sort of magnetic or electric field you're coming into contact with, right, they say, with like big powerful electric fields, if it's

direct current, you feel a tug. If it's alternating current, you feel a vibration. Yeah, they say that this is crazy. If you get near anything like say a microwave of it while it's turned on, so you'd be able to feel that of course, if you came into contact with any magnets you could you would feel the tug. If it was a powerful magnet, you could feel being stuck to it. Um. If it's a powerful enough electro magnet, like say in a m R I, you could suffer

some serious damage. So that would be one thing you would have to let anyone know that you have this magnet in your body if you were to go in for like an m r I scan, because otherwise you could cause some pretty serious havoc inside the machine. Yeah, but the idea is that it extends our senses so that when you come into contact with these things, which normally we would be unaware of. Right, we would normally not notice it unless something on us reacted to it.

Now we've got something. You could have something in you that would react to this, something that's particularly sensitive to this sort of stuff. And not only that, but using the same technology, the same procedure of having a magnet implanted in your finger, you can pair that with other devices that are able to detect completely different types of UH data and and feel it. So, for example, let's say you've got a sensor that can pick up UM.

I don't know let's say infrared. It's a sensor that can pick up infrared and it has a threshold, so anything over a certain amount that sensor generates enough electricity to activate an electro magnet. You also happen to have one of these magnets in your finger, so you're pairing this external device with the magnet in your finger. You move the external device around and whenever it detects heat that is above that threshold, it sends that signal and you feel it, so you now know if something is

hot even if you're not close to it. Or another example would be echolocation, where it sends out an ultrasonic signal, it comes back and as you get closer and closer to an object, that sends pulses to an electro magnet, which again trigger the magnet that's in your fingers, so you can actually feel when you get closer to something

without seeing it. So I've seen demonstrations of this where a person is sitting down at a table, they have a blindfold on, they've got one of these little devices, and they've got the magnet in their finger, and someone puts something down in front of them, like a box of cereal, and the and they're told that there is something on this table in front of you. You have to detect where it is without reaching out and trying

to just grow up around. And so they would use this little ultrasonic echolocation device and point it and when they would hit where the cereal box was, it's, oh, it's right there, because I can feel it. I can feel the you know, from the sensor. So it's kind

of a two step process here, right. But I've seen it paired with a lot of different ways, And in fact, a lot of bio hackers say that the the ability to detect a magnetic field or an electric field is just that's just the tip of the iceberg if you pair it with these other technologies. Yeah, so one of the number one I think this is really cool in theory. Again, not endorsing the self surgery thing, yeah, but the idea

of expanding your senses is really cool. The second thing, though, is it is interesting that what you're doing here is you're sort of repurposing part of one sense or a combination and of senses to give you new data. So you're still expanding your ability to build a mental picture

of the outside world. But what you're doing is giving yourself an implant that uses your innate probably a combination of your sense of touch and your appropriate reception, your sense of where your finger is, and your feeling of movement within it to send that data to your brain. So it's a cognitive adaptation. You're using your thoughts. You're not adding You're not adding some brand new type of sensor that has to form a brand new kind of

neural relationship with your brain for this to happen. What you're doing is you're just interpreting a new set of touch stimuli and you're applying that to a different, you know, a different experience. But it's not like you had to invent something new, like you had to figure out, oh, well, now I've got to figure out how my brain interprets magnets. It's not because it's not magnets. It's the sense of

that sense of pressure. Yeah, we're going to talk about a few more, and this will actually apply to pretty much all of them, I guess all of them. They're all talking about repurposing part of one sense to create new ways of modeling reality. They're not talking about creating a new sense that didn't exist before. Because Frankly, we just don't know enough about the brain to do that, and in most cases we don't understand enough about how

we actually input that data in the first place. Oh yeah, yeah, So let's talk about another one, another potential sense. What about electro reception? Could you have electro reception like a shark? And I want to go ahead and say I don't really think so. That one's not so much on the radar, mainly because you don't want to live in the ocean, right, whole episode about living under the ocean. Yeah, but that was living in capsules. You you don't want to live

in the water. I would get really pruny, fair play, fair play. That would be pruny, prunny landscape of badness, all right, escape of badness? All right? Well, anyway, so the sharks and other elector receptive animals live in water, and the air doesn't conduct electrical currents like seawater does the way we talked about. So do no land animals have this sense? I found evidence of one one land dwelling animal that uses electro reception. That's the Australian echidna

orchidna kidna. Yeah, it's sort of sort of like a platypus, And here's how it works. It digs around in the wet top soil with its beak, which has electro receptors that detect the squigglings of earthworms somewhere down in that moist soil. Does that sound like a power up you want? I think? Uh? I think I could write an entire series about a superhero whose only power with the detection of earthworms, to root around in the ground with its nose. That's all he can do. It would be about as

good as aqua man. Yeah, yeah, the lateral move. Okay, okay. What about infrared sensing? I think this is a really cool one, and it's actually tied into some research that's good for other reasons. So we already talked about the natural infrared sensing of snakes, but it is possible to teach your brain to interpret infrared signals with the help

of technology. So in researchers led by Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nikolaylis published findings on a study that used a neural implant to bring infrared vision to mice, or maybe not vision, I don't know. It's probably something more like long range infrared touch yeah, and so the way it worked was the Duke scientists created an electronic infrared sensor, so that's just a standard mechanical infrared sensor external to

the mouse's brain. It mounts on the forehead. Then they wired the device directly to the mouse's brain so the device can send electrical impulses down into the somato sensory cortex, which is the part of the mouse's brain that interprets tactile information like touch. Specifically, they said it was to the part that comes from the touch on the mouse's whiskers.

So let's try it out. You you put a mouse in a contraption like this with its brain all wired up, and you put it in a test chamber with multiple ports, say ports A through D, and each one of these ports has the capability to light up with an infrared light, which is normally invisible to mice. It's invisible told mammals. Now, when the infrared light comes on into port, that port offers a sip of water as a reward if the

mouse runs to that port. After a period of training, the mice were able to use the neural implant to quickly detect and find rewards based on infrared light that's invisible to their eyes, and that's pretty cool directly to the brain. So one interesting observation was that before the mice were trained, they reacted to the data coming from the implant by scratching at their faces like they were itching. So they interpret it literally as a physical sensation, something

like a tickle on the face. Oh wow, because it was wired to that same part of their brain. So so they were like, I see this thing and it's making my face it yeah. And the people who who authored this study emphasized how this isn't limited just to infrared, say, or to this kind of part of the brain. It's

generally a proof that hey, we could expand this. We could use technology to sense things and then send that data directly to the brain so you wouldn't have to rout it through some other part of the body or sense. And another one of the things about it is that they showed how you can hijack part of the brain two So in this case, the part of the brain that detects touch to detect a new type of data without destroying that part of the brain's natural ability. So

the mice still had an intact sense of touch. It wasn't the case. They could still run around and detect where they were, you know, winds based on their whiskers, or if they were brushing against something that that was still fine. Sure, yeah, you could. You could partially hijack

this sense without destroying its natural capabilities. So what's interesting to me is that we talked about in nature how birds see magnetic fields, or at least that's what that's the that's the prevailing theory, prevailing prevailing theory that they're

seeing magnetic fields. And now we've got mice feeling infrared, and I would have put those, Uh, I would have switched those just just based upon like if I were again, if you weren't giving me all this information and you just told me, how do you how do you think they perceived this? Like was? It was the most analogous too for people. I would have gone with vision for

infrared and feeling for magnetic fields. I wonder why they why they chose specifically the whisker touchy, Yeah, I'd suspect it had to do with the part that they the part of the brain that they understood the best. Probably if you were to put in, say the visual cortex, it might be that the mice just start hallucinating like crazy. You just have a mouse just tripping out, and that's that's not a very useful mouse. That's just pinky in

the brain. Yeah, speaking of tripping, what about human echolocation using some sort of electronic device. Oh yeah, we mentioned that earlier. Well, that's real. People have created this. Let's talk about Spider Man. What is Spider Man's spidy sense. How does it work? Well? Magic? But no, no, no, I'm not asking the mechanism. What's what's it do? It

detects danger? Yeah, So, when when something is about to hit Spider Man upside the head, he gets a little early warning which allows him to use his amazing boosted reflexes to dodge all the way before said things smacks him upside the head. Right, So, when he's in the movie theater talking through the movie and people behind him start throwing soda bottles and stuff like that at him, he knows it's coming before you can tell from the little squiggly lines that come out from his head. That's

the spidy sense. Yes, yeah, the exact mechanical causation of the Spider senses, I believe unknown in the Spider Verse spider spider man verse. It's not magic, it's science. The spader verse, the web slinging is science, spider science. But you might be able to simulate this with sound based at echolocation, or probably with with light based echolocation, also with like radar or something, but the specific example I

want to talk about here is sound based. So a computer science grad student named Victor Mativitsi created a project called the Spider Sense Suit last year, and here's how it works. All over your body, so your legs, chest, back, arms, You've got little suit nodes connected by wires, and at each of these nodes are ultrasound microphones. They send out ultrasonic signals and then listen for them to bounce back at a distance of up to seventeen feet as an

object comes closer. Tiny robotic arms at the nodes facing the object apply pressure to the skin, letting you know that you're near a solid piece of matter. So with the system like this, you could navigate hallways with your eyes closed or since people approaching you silently from behind. And apparently the creators used it to throw cardboard shuriken at attackers while blindfolded. So you can become a cardboard ninja. Uh you know, I love this idea. And you know,

we call this haptic feedback. This idea that when you have some sort of sensory input and then you get this tactile output. Uh So video games use this all the time, like you just rumble controllers and a simple example, but there are a lot of other ones. I've seen things like um chest plates and helmets that vibrate so that every time you're shot you get a little zap or or sometimes it's a bit of an impact, a thud.

But in this case, it's one that's responding not to a an action within a video game, but rather getting closer to some sort of object because the ultrasonic signal has gone out, bounced back and indicated how far away that thing is and whether or not it's approaching or moving further away. Again, the Doppler effect comes into play there.

And but but but ultrasonic waves are really quite precise. Yeah. Yeah, so you can be measured really quite precisely, and in fact, and in fact, since there's so many nodes to that also that helps with the precision because you have presumably they're all sending out these signals and the time that it starts coming back. It can actually be pretty precise on the direction of the oncoming object, the person, or whatever.

I guess. I guess we couldn't comment on exactly how precise this thing is because we haven't used it, but obviously it was it was precise enough that it was useful in these demonstrations. Yeah, it's pretty cool idea. I like the potential applications for it. Even if it never goes beyond say a curiosity, it's still pretty cool. Although you could see quote unquote, you could see potential applications that would be pretty useful. So yeah, I mean, our

senses are pretty amazing. The more we learn about them, the more phenomenal they seem. Even even though it's kind of mundane because it's the stuff we live with day in and day out. What we are able to accomplish is pretty incredible when you think of all the chemicals were detecting, all the light we're able to interpret. But that doesn't mean that we have to be satisfied with them. So I I do think that it's going to be

pretty cool. We're going to find more and more ways in the future to create ways to augment these senses. Either to make them uh like our vision more even more keen, or perhaps being able to detect further outside the visit what's normally considered the visible spectrum. Maybe will be redefining what is detectable by human means in another

decade or two. Who knows. I think one cool thing about this might apply to theoretical astrobiology, because if you're talking about the ways that we can expand human senses, you might also be coming up with cool ideas for

how aliens might create models of the world. There's no reason to expect that they would use the same kind of sense as we do to create physical models of reality, right, Yeah, they might have an entirely different way of sensing their environments and interacting with them and and uh deriving meaning from things, which presents itself with lots of different scenarios, many of which I'm sure we will explore in science

fiction down the road. Because the mind boggles, really, I mean, you could have an alien race that has a completely different construction of of what reality is based upon the the kinds of data that it can receive and interpret. It could be just as accurate and useful to them as ours is to us. It would just be alien, which is kind of cool. Well, anyway, that wraps up this discussion. If you guys out there have any suggestions for topics we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking,

you should let us know. You can send us an email. The address is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. The handle at all three locations is FW thinking and we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,