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Who should I talk to in a group? I have a bunch of existing "social senses" for navigating this, but they're not very reliable. If a clear You-Should-Talk-To-This-Person sense went off whenever I encountered someone appropriate, that would be nice.
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Brainstorming new senses
I've always wanted this, but in a magical genie kind of way! OK cupid tries to do something like this by matching people pre-meeting. At an IRL interaction I can't imagine how a computer would figure this out before I did unless it had a very accurate idea of every personality in the group. So every person would have to have personality tests on file. Which I guess isn't implausible in the future!
I also wonder if this would silo people even more among others similar to them. If anti-vaxers only talk to other anti-vaxers, and none of them have ever been friends or talked to a proponent of vaccination, they have no reason to ever change their mind. People who grew up poor only talk to other people who grew up poor, and the same for those who grew up rich, so fewer unexpected opportunities for social mobility/job offers/connections.
I want to detect cell growths of the type that could become cancerous and so on.
That's useful information to have but I would be fine with a device that gives me that information and displays the information to me.
There's little additional value from getting the information as a sense.
Also note that most pre-cancerous and even post-cancerous cells are dealt with easily by the immune system. Its a very small minority of cancer cells that escape, you would end up just driving yourself crazy by sensing/noticing each one. This is why they aren't recommending mammograms, pap smears, or prostate exams as much or for as wide an age range as they used to, for young and healthy immune systems, treatment has worse outcomes than just letting the body do its thing.
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Brainstorming new senses
Emotion detector/encoder/transmitter/decoder/injector would be quite useful to the less neurotypical of us. The emotion injection part seems the hardest.
I could see this successfully using face-recognition software and tied into the auditory sense. I can't remember where I read it, but I read that people on the autism spectrum respond as strongly to the emotions evoked in music as neurotypical people. An emotion decoding computer (those exist and are pretty good now) can decide whether a person's mood should be represented by a happy C chord or a sad D minor or an angry discordant sound or an stressed buzz, and the musicality would be a good non-invasive emotional injector/empathizator.
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Brainstorming new senses
Bottlenose can be built at home and gives a very primitive sense of echolocation.
Echolocation was the first thing that came to mind for me. Do you have more info about this? I couldn't find anything on google.
our built in chemorecepters are sensitive to the metabolites of most pathogens even at a high ppm
Don't you mean at a low ppm, i.e. when there are few of the particles being detected?
I already have this and it's horrible.
Somewhere in between your level of discomfort from not doing things and my level (which is 0)...
I think it would be kind of nice to have it embodied in an actual physical sensation like needing to pee, instead of a nagging and building sense of guilt and self-directed frustration? You could externalize those feelings and maybe it would let you train those skills without developing the same emotional ugh fields.
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Brainstorming new senses
A 'taste' for pathogen bacteriae in food.
For the majority of pathogens this already exists. Certain ones like botulism are tasteless /odorless, but our built in chemorecepters are sensitive to the metabolites of most pathogens even at a high ppm (in other words, rotten/rancid food smells gross even when it is just starting to turn.)
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Brainstorming new senses
How about: as a commitment mechanism, a small but nagging amount of discomfort related to your procrastination on a measurable task. I'm picturing this working something like the need to pee, with the difference that it resets at night: the discomfort could build throughout the day and instantly be resolved when you completed the task and reduced as you work toward the task.
For instance, if you committed to exercising a certain amount, accelerameters could estimate physical activity. for every step you took, your discomfort would decrease and for ever hour you sat on the couch, your discomfort would grow.
Possible commitments this would work with: exercise anki decks habbitrpg points spend a certain amount of time talking per day (for the recluse/introvert trying to train social skills)
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
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this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by the comment you are now reading
see my comment on shminux's post ^^