Could This Futuristic Vest Give Us a Sixth Sense?
For starters, the new technology—appearing on ‘Westworld’ before hitting the market—could help the deaf parse speech and ambient noise
By Kate Keller
smithsonian.com
April 20, 2018
David Eagleman thinks there should be more to human sensory perception than sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. The Stanford neuroscientist foresees a future in which humans could develop new “senses†for all sorts of information, using wearable technology to feed data to the brain.
Eagleman has dedicated his career to studying how the brain takes in signals and constructs consciousness. He took a special interest in synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulating one of the five senses creates the simultaneous perception of another – such as individuals who can “hear†color. If his study of synesthesia clarified one thing, it was that human sensory perceptions are not an objective reproduction of reality, but instead an inference that the brain draws from the signals it receives.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-this-futuristic-vest-give-us-sixth-sense-180968852/#XSe41lklYtiSje7d.99
