What if we could one day feel things we couldn’t see, or taste sounds? As strange as that question sounds, it could be reality according to David Eagleman. In his TED talk he outlines several ways to substitute or increase our senses with technology. Some of these innovations might even be cheaper or replace the current technology being used. He explains that each animal has its own “umwelt” or surrounding world. For instance, humans can see less than ten trillionth of light rays, these rays aren’t un-seeable as we know snakes see infrared rays to get food and honeybees can see ultraviolent rays. But because we don’t experience these rays we don’t miss seeing them. Science has helped us in some ways experience senses we have lost. Some deaf
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This is where you are feeding information into your brain through unusual channels, much like putting your potato head together incorrectly. David uses the example of a device called a brain port, which sits on the tongue of a blind person and, after a little bit of time learning with this device, the blind person can see well enough to put a ball in a basket. This is much like putting your potato heads tongue on his eyes. A device David and a graduate student are working on is a vest that will help deaf people hear. This vest maps sounds through vibration patterns and after four days with only 2 hours each day with the vest, a deaf person was capable of learning simple words. This could be a major breakthrough for many deaf people as the vest is less invasive than surgery and 40 times cheaper than the cochlear …show more content…
I think about how I have many family and friends on my Facebook and while I can’t live on there, it seems social media is the way we keep in touch through our busy lives. If I had a watch that would vibrate when certain words were shared by family members or certain feelings, then I could go on about my daily tasks without checking it so often. I highly doubt the world is going to slow down and advances in technology that can improve how we process data might be the best way to help us busy humans multitask our lives. But I am weary of negative side effects, if we attempt to add to our senses through technology we might become dependent on it to survive. I know when my cell phone isn’t working I feel lost, but I have lived in a time without cell phones. What if adding to our senses makes us lose other senses? Much like a person who can’t smell has a hard time knowing the difference between the flavor of onions and apples, if we added to one of our senses, maybe another might become weaker. This would ultimately lead to us becoming more reliant on technology to strengthen or replace those other
This is where you are feeding information into your brain through unusual channels, much like putting your potato head together incorrectly. David uses the example of a device called a brain port, which sits on the tongue of a blind person and, after a little bit of time learning with this device, the blind person can see well enough to put a ball in a basket. This is much like putting your potato heads tongue on his eyes. A device David and a graduate student are working on is a vest that will help deaf people hear. This vest maps sounds through vibration patterns and after four days with only 2 hours each day with the vest, a deaf person was capable of learning simple words. This could be a major breakthrough for many deaf people as the vest is less invasive than surgery and 40 times cheaper than the cochlear …show more content…
I think about how I have many family and friends on my Facebook and while I can’t live on there, it seems social media is the way we keep in touch through our busy lives. If I had a watch that would vibrate when certain words were shared by family members or certain feelings, then I could go on about my daily tasks without checking it so often. I highly doubt the world is going to slow down and advances in technology that can improve how we process data might be the best way to help us busy humans multitask our lives. But I am weary of negative side effects, if we attempt to add to our senses through technology we might become dependent on it to survive. I know when my cell phone isn’t working I feel lost, but I have lived in a time without cell phones. What if adding to our senses makes us lose other senses? Much like a person who can’t smell has a hard time knowing the difference between the flavor of onions and apples, if we added to one of our senses, maybe another might become weaker. This would ultimately lead to us becoming more reliant on technology to strengthen or replace those other