Do Supersenses Exist?

Hey, if you can use stereo headphones to listen to this episode. Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio More Hit Cham And today we're tackling the question do super senses exist? Scientists out there have an idea that we can give humans new senses beyond the ones we already have, and this is done by basically hacking

My name is Liam Norman, and a lot of my research concerns human perception, in particular human echolocation.

I investigate echolocation, in particular how people echolocate and how they use echolocation to perceive their Welsh and how they learn it amazing.

Maybe can you start us off by explaining what is echolocation.

Echolocation is the process where typically an animal make a sound, That sound goes out in the environment, and then when there's something in the sounds past, it will reflect the sound and so that's the echo that then comes back to the person and they can hear that echo, and this carries spatial information.

But what's around them? Yes, can you give some examples of humans that are able to do this?

So one of the possibly most famous non echo locators Daniel Kish, he is blind from an early age. He's American, and he has used echo location as long as he can remember, and he uses mouth clicks as his sound that he makes. So they're very brief, trendient sound there like this, and these sounds then travel out in the environment and the echoes return to him the reflections of the sound. It doesn't mean that he clicks all the time, you know, the ouphent situations where he doesn't need to.

So why do you think this person, Daniel Kish is so famous?

Now, Daniel Kish is very good at echo location. We have tested his skills and variety experiment and so we found that he's extremely good at localizing how fartings are weigh and whether they are to the left or right, So he can, for example, determine a shift in the distance of about centimeter.

Here we're talking about Daniel Kish, one of the most well known human echolocators. If you google his name you can find lots of videos of him using echolocation. Mister Kish is so good at it. If you place an object, say five ft in front of him, he can tell if you move that object half an inch closer or half an inch back, and he can tell if you move it a few inches to the right or to the left. He can also tell what shape an object is.

So it was a bit of a silly experiment, but we just wanted to test possible So we had different shapes that were made from cardboards and there were either a triangle or a circuleancequere and wrecked angle and represented one at a time, and he was allowed to click at them as long as he wanted and to move his head, and she could tell them a part very easily.

Actually, mister Kish is also able to recognize the texture of an object, whether it's rough or smooth, and he can tell if something is hollow or flat, can tell their size, whether they're up or down, and all of it while being completely blind. It's really quite amazing. But here's the surprising fact. Daniel Kish is not unique. There are many expert echo locators out there like him, and actually doctor Steller and Norman think that anyone can learn

That's a good question. The short answer is, anybody who has an ability to use hearing normally to locate sounds should be able to learn echo location to some degree.

So one thing that we've learned is that anyone can learn to echolocate people with pickle vision, people who are blind. Obviously, it is mediated through hearing, so if there's a profound hearing loss, then there are natural limits to how this can work. But in principle. It's very learnable and we had in workshops at the youngest child that's learned it was three years old, and in our research, which today has focused on adults, the oldest person was seventy nine years old.

Wow.

Yes, people from three years old to seventy nine years old can learn to echo locate. You don't need to be blind or have special hearing to do it, although it helps you have been doing it for a while.

As with anything, there is a benefit to learning this ability from a young age. So the best human echolocate is that we know began learning this ability either in early or middle childhood.

Wow. How do you train someone to echo locate?

For our research, we have developed a paradigm where we have different tasks that we ask people to do.

Okay, here's how you can train to echo locate. The first thing you have to do is learn to make the clicking sound with your mouth.

And so this is usually made by placing the tongue in a particular position at the roof of the mouth and then keeping the mouth open. You then bring the tone down quite quickly and it can create a kind of a short popping sound or a clicking sound. It sounds like a.

Now you don't have to make this particular sound. Some echo locators use shouts or hissing or whistling. You can also use a clicker in your hand. But mouth clicks are good because they're short so they don't interfere with the echo. They're sharp, so they have lots of high frequencies which give you more resolution, and they come from your mouth, which is a fixed distance from your ears, so it's more consistent.

And then once you've established that the person is comfortable making a mouth click, then it's just about teaching them what to listen for in the echoes. And the key thing is to start with tasks that are fairly simple and then just develop the difficulty in a step by step way. For example, you can place a large object in front of the person. They can be very close to the head, and then you ask them to make a click, and then you can take the object away.

And this training works. Even people who don't have a visual impairment can learn to have sonar like a bat.

And you'd be surprised. It sounds difficult. But then we have people who at first are very doubtful, like oh, no, I cannot dose this as sort of ago, and then they come in for the second or third session and

Yes, it seems anyone can learn to echo locate. Even you could learn to do it, you just have to want to learn. In fact, the two researchers we're talking to who are both sided taught themselves to echo locate. So you're able to echo locate, you've taught yourself to do it.

Yeah, I have had a good role model. I'm not as good as many of the echo locations, but I'm not too bad. I can do some you know, basic stuff.

Okay, But here's the thing about echo location principle. It's easy to know what's going on. You make a sound, the sound goes out, it bounces on things, it comes back to your ears, and from the echo you can tell what's there. But if you talk to anyone who can echo locate, they're not really thinking about any of the physics or even the timing between the sound and the bouncing echo. It's really more of a feeling. Was

Yeah, definitely. I started out expecting or I must have this revelation of this this echo that I'm hearing, but often that's not what it sounds like. There's something's presented at one two meters. Also, for me, it's more the quality that I'm paying attention to and so that was an ahab moment for me.

I see, it's not so much about hearing the echo, but maybe kind of feeling the echo.

Yeah.

In other words, unless you're sh across the Grand Canyon, Hello, Hello, in a room with objects close to you, the echoes happen way too fast for us to consciously notice them, which means that when you echo locate, your brain is sort of processing the echo automatically, and to your conscious self, it's just the feeling that you.

Get it's close.

Or to the right or left, or that it's round or rough or smooth. And that means that either your brain is already wired to do echolocation, or your brain rewires itself as you learn to do it. So when we come back, we're going to find out which is the case by digging into what happens in the brain of people who echo locate, and we're going to find out what that means for our ability to hack the brain to gain more supersensus. Stay with us, we'll be

Yeah, I think this is one of the most fascinating things about this topic. Who don't have all the answers yet. But first of all, that location is obviously processed through the auditory system because it is part of our hearing.

Okay, this is the first interesting fact about the brain activity of people who use echolocation, and that is that they're part of the brain that scientists normally think is used to see things. The visual cortex lights up when they echo locate, and this is unexpected because A you see this in expert echo locators who are blind, so they're definitely not using their eyes and b echolocation only

When we followed this up later on, wondering is there a systematic pattern to this activity, we found that it's not just responding to the echos, but that there's a relationship between the location and space where the echo comes from and the part of the brain in this eartivisual context that maps that takeos sound and let's often retract to as retino topek mapping.

All right, this is a little complicated but super interesting. If you're a sighted person, there's kind of a one to one mapping between what you see and which part of the visual area of your brain lights up. This is the little patch of brain that first gets the

So it seems like there are parts in the brand that have a high degree of what we call plasticity, which is the capability to change and adapt over time to process information from sensory modolities that they ordinarily would process.

In other words, the wiring of your brain for your senses isn't fixed. If your brain notices, for example, that you're not using your visual area because maybe you're blind, your brain will start using that area for other senses. In this case, the visual area is used to process what the echo locators are getting through their ears when they send out these sounds and then hear the echoes. And not only that, Doctor Thaler and Norman think your

Yes, and there is some evidence to suggest that is the case. So somebody who who is initially naive to this ability but then learns it over maybe a ten week period, we find subtle changes in order for your brain areas where there might be high gradmouta density in that area. But at the same time we also get these functional changes in visual codex where the role of the brain reagion has changed to some extent.

So when learning to echolocate, your brain possibly grows the hearing parts of your brain and it starts using the seeing parts of your brain for processing the information you hear. In other words, your brain to some degree molds itself to this new sense so that it becomes a natural addition to your existing senses. And this says something profound about the brain. Well, what do you think this says about just human senses and human abilities how our brain works.

I think it says a couple of things. I think it tells us that our sensory abilities are much more adaptable than what we previously believed. So the classic textbook idea is that where you have the visual codex that processes site, you have the order free codex that processes hearing and so on. But research seem to suggest that these brain readers are much more adaptable and they can

It just creates, like, for me, I think this feeling of yeah, we do have a sensory repertoire that we're born with that we use every day, but we can actually do a lot more. It just makes you sort of believe in, you know, other possibilities. If you think about technology that might make you able to sense the mood in a room or favorite example. Also you know, sense magnetic lords or something like that. You know where if you have technology to provide you this information and

Wait, did you just say that we could expand our senses so we can sense magnetism using technolology and our brain can adapt to that well. As it happens, I talked to a scientists working on just this idea. So when we come back, we're going to see how technology can hack your brain to give you extra senses like sensing magnetic fields or even Wi Fi. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about whether supersensus exist. Now, this last segment is going to

And somehow you can tell how hot something.

Is just by looking at it. You wouldn't have to touch it or get near it to tell. You would just no, you could tell if a pan was the right temperature, or if a piece of steak was hot enough. Or imagine, if you could sense the Earth's magnetic field, you could have a perfect sense of direction. You would always know where north was, no matter how deep in a forest you were, or if you were inside a

So my name is Amber Myimon. I'm a researcher at the interface of neuroscience and human computer interaction. Most of my research has to do with how we can use technologies to induce neuroplasticity.

Now, I always thought that humans had five senses, but the first thing I learned from doctor Mymon is that apparently we have more than five senses.

So we basically inherited the five senses from philosophers many, many, many decades ago, such as Aristotle, who said that we have five basic senses. We have vision, hearing, touch, tastes, and smell, which people are usually familiar with.

But we don't have five senses.

So that's the thing. It's an issue of hot debate. Right now, I can give you an example. We have something called approprioceptive sense, which is kind of a sense of where our body parts are located. So I can know where my hand is located, for example, even if I don't see my hand. And then we also have vestibular system, which controls our sense of balance and more and more.

Yes, scientists can't really agree how many senses we have. Some people say our ability to sense temperature, or to feel or heart beat or are breathing, or our sense of balance, or even our ability to feel pain should also be included in our list of senses. A sense, it seems, includes any time we know something about the world, including our bodies, without thinking about it. It's when we just know information about the world. Okay, now let's get

Right, So the idea of augmenting our senses is generally changing our sensory abilities in a positive way for some form of improvement, like for example, Superman and see into the thermal range. Is it something that I've personally worked on and it's an interesting time.

So a supersense is basically giving ourselves the ability to sense something we currently can't sense, like seeing into the infrared or having X ray vision, or being able to sense the Earth's magnetic field. And for that you need technology.

Now.

According to doctor Mama, there are two ways to do this. The first is to base turn yourself into a cyborg.

There are methods to augment our senses that are invasive or they physically interact with our brain. So I can give you some examples. You can have an implant, for example, Retinal prosthesis are known as bionic eyes colloquially in day to day's each These are implants that electrically stimulate whether it's the retina today. There are also cortical implants that stimulate the brain directly, and what they do is they

And I guess can that be used to augment someone without a visual impairment? Like, can I use an implant to make me see better?

Yes, absolutely. There's also more and more awareness of this concept of augmenting the senses, which means enhancing or extending.

So one way to extend our senses with technology is with neural prosthetics. In other words, implanting some device senses something about the world and then having that device give that information directly to your nerves or directly to our brains. Believe it or not, that's something that's being developed right now.

You can imagine that the device could have.

A regular camera to allow someone who's blind to see, or you can imagine using this to give someone a super sense. For example, you could attach a camera that also sees infrared or X rays, or that has a super telescoping lens or a super microscope lens, and then the implant would zap your nerves tell your brain what it sees. I could do a whole episode about this idea.

But what's really fascinating is that there are also non invasive ways that take advantage of a couple things. They take advantage of the fact that we have connections between our senses. They take advantage of the fact that our brain is plastic.

Okay, remember when we talked about echolocation. Echolocation is basically a supersense, although it still relies on sensus we already have in this case hearing. But echolocation is important because of two things we mentioned before. The first is that the brain is flexible, and when you echo locate, you actually use the parts you usually used to see, the visual parts of your brain to process what you hear. Scientists call this cross modal correspondence, which is when your

So, for example, if you're familiar with Billie Eilish, the singer, or for El Williams, they have reported that when they associate automatically, they correlate different sounds and colors, and this affects their artistic abilities. It affects their music and their music making abilities. And another example is the painter Kandinski. He also correlated between colors and sounds but also shapes, and this very much affected his artwork.

Now, some people have a lot of synesthesia, like the artist doctor Maima just mentioned, but all of us have to some degree some cross wiring between our senses. For example, if I asked you to think of a shape and I said the word guba again, gouba, most of you probably thought of something round and maybe big. But now if I ask you to think of another shape and I said the word tikiki, you probably thought of something

We have the concept of novel senses, which we can call supersensus, which is basically taking information in the world that's not censor information such as air quality, pollution, or even Wi Fi information that's out there in the world, and conveying it to people in a sensory way. So, for example, I can convey Wi Fi information as tactile information on my body.

Okay, here's the idea. Instead of directly connecting say an infrared camera or compassed directly into your brain or nervous system, you could have that device talk to your brain through one of your other senses. So, for example, you could wear a belt that vibrated the closer you are to pointing to the north pole. Or you could wear an infrared camera that played a special sound for you whenever you were looking at something hot, or you could wear glasses that turn pink the closer you are to a

Exactly, that's precisely what we're doing. We're taking the thermal information acquired through the thermal camera and through an algorithm and six stages of mapping that I won't get into, and we divided it into hot, cold, and neutral.

Okay, So imagine the chef is wearing a camera and whenever they look at something hot or cold or room temperature, they hear a different sound. For example, whenever the infrared camera sees something it knows is hot, it would play this sound. When the chef faces something the camera knows is cold, you would play this sound. And that's enough to give you a super sense.

And this was very intuitive. People with fifteen minutes of training could learn to identify thermal information hot and cold information that is invisible to them through their sense of vision. For example, they could recognize a cold item in a bag that they couldn't.

See, now, what's cool is that. In doctor Memo's experiment, the sound they played also told the person a little about where the hot or cold object was by changing the pitch of the sound.

We didn't want them to only perceive the hot and cold. We also wanted them to know where something hot and where something cold is. We played back to them the auditory information using pitch manipulation. If a hot item was located higher up, it would have the hot sound, but also it would have a higher pitched sound, and people could learn to understand this very quickly, could learn to perceive this form of information very quickly.

So, for example, if the chef in the kitchen was facing four pots on a stove, the computer would play a specific sound to them, and they would instantly and intuitively just know which of the four pots was hot and which was coal.

And finally, we tested them. We tested them both on their ability to locate objects through sound, and we tested them on their ability to recognize the temperature of objects through sound. And ultimately they got up to something like eighty seven percent abilities for recognizing thermal information that's invisible to their eyes.

And so you're cooking, you're cooking, and I'm training this. So now when I see a pen, there's a sound plane in my ear, but I'm not thinking about the sound, but I know somehow that how hot that pen is?

Exactly?

Wow, that's super cool, so.

Intuitive to the extent that over time you don't even hear it as sounds. You perceive it as thermal information.

Wow.

And so suddenly you have the kind of the superpowers of a snake or superman.

Absolutely, we want to give these chefs superman abilities.

Yeah, oh wow, Well, chess are superheroes already.

Chefs are superheroes, at least the good ones. All right.

I think the big takeaway of this episode is that supersensus are possible.

It's within our power to teach.

Ourselves new ways to sense the world, like an echo location, and it's within current technology to give us census we didn't think we're possible, like sensing magnetic fields or sensing.

Temperature from afar.

Need to be firm krypton or get bitten by a radioactive spider, or even have something implanted in you, you can use the power of the brain's ability to adapt to gain or sensus. Now you might be thinking, where does this end? What will this do to humans? That was the last question I asked doctor Maimund. Well, maybe just to wrap it up, what do you think it

So ultimately, at the very simplest level, it will increase our performance abilities, right, It'll maximize what we can do in this world. It's really getting people to maximize their potential and stretch their brain to its life limits and find out what we can do that we don't currently do.

All Right, I hope that all made sense and maybe even super sense. Thanks for joining us. See you next time you've been listening to science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hey Cham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer k cy peprom And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name