Synesthesia: that number is orange-red

What does September, green, and the number 6 have in common?

People with synesthesia can link one sensory concept to a different sense. Think of it as one part of the brain spilling-over into another. The most common connection is between shape and color recognition;  letters and numbers can take on different hues and shades. Try looking at this number pattern; can you see the words?

Each person has a unique set of associations. The letter A may look red to one person, and yellow to another. Both would feel uncomfortable if you show them a blue colored A.

Some people can see time laid out as a track or a line, and each month as a different shape: June may be longer and thinner than December, the future and past stretch in different directions, and the weeks and the days stack up in detailed compartments.

Some can see the colors of different sounds and notes, or associate spoken words with shapes. The concepts and senses mingle together like a rich metaphor. Neurologist Ramachandran mentioned that synesthesia is eight times more likely in artists, and may form the basis of creativity and metaphoric thinking.

So your brain can wire itself to link between two different senses, or two modes of input. How can we use that?

To repair and replace senses for people with a damaged sensory organ! Someone could be blind, or color-blind, because of a defect in her eyes, but the visual centers of her brain could still be fully functional. More on that in the next post.

Synthetic senses

We all perceive the world through our senses. Together, they filter reality into subjective experience. But reality has so much more to it than what we can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, right? Yes, but it is harder to imagine that I expected.

A colorblind person can't understand what some colors look like; she has no basis to compare red and green. Just knowing there is a difference doesn't make the problem go away. Similarly, we don't understand physical concepts like "north" or "10 amps" until they are translated, with instruments, into something that we can sense. A few pioneers have tried to incorporate these instruments into their bodies, in hope of finding a new, synthetic sense.

Adam Skory from Noisebridge (a hackspace) developed a wearable directional sensor called the Northpaw that translates the magnetic direction into a buzzing signal. The wearer feels a constant vibration on her ankle, but the experience quickly becomes subconscious - the brain can rewire the sense of touch into a new sense of direction! This wonderful property of the brain is called "neuroplasticity".

"It passes in and out of my integrated experience. When it’s at its best, my awareness is not of the touch from the Northpaw, it’s the awareness of north from the Northpaw." - My New Sense Organ


While having a compass sense might not seem useful to most people, the Air Force has been working on a similar device that helps pilots: the Spatial Orientation Enhancement System. During tricky maneuvers, a pilot may lose the sense of gravity, which is perceived by our inner ears. In free-fall, this sense becomes disoriented, and the pilot may forget which way is down - the result can be fatal. This suit uses gentle vibrations to remind him the right direction. This augmented sense may become even more useful as the Airforce switches from aircrafts to UAVs: a joystick pilot currently has no situational awareness other than what he sees on the screen.

Some body-modification enthusiasts have implanted small magnets into their fingertips, enabling them to feel magnetic fields, electric currents, and some metals.

But there's more, right? What else can we sense? Most super-senses are just augmentations of the ones we have: Superman's x-ray vision, Predator's infrared vision, telescopic and microscopic vision, super-hearing, a bat's echolocation, a dog's ability of smell, a bee's vision of polarized light, a spider's sense of vibration. Barring any supernatural phenomena, it seems we've come to the end of our exploration of sensory input. After all, physics and chemistry only allows for a few fundamental modes of interaction.

Or maybe, like the colorblind, I'm unable to imagine what other wonderful experiences there are in the margins of reality.

Death's advocate: part 1

I mentioned in the last post that people have come up with many ways of justifying their mortality; most of us, when we become adults, have thought about the meaning of our own lives and deaths. But there are some who openly promote death and the idea that death has intrinsic value. I'll try to refute these Death's advocates as best I can.

Today's Dinosaur Comics (a hilarious and well-written web comic by Ryan North) gives a solid example of a more general argument: death is necessary for progress. There's an image of old people lounging on their porches, reminiscing and clinging onto the good-old-days. What if that's what society becomes?

That's unfair, of course. People can change; each and every person has potential to remake themselves. Ideas and beliefs are not carved into our brains. We can learn and understand new concepts. The religious can become atheist, and skeptics can discover faith. Innovation and growth can move us no matter what age we are.

On the converse, new generations do not guarantee changes in social mores. "Young" and "new" are not necessarily synonyms. Every generation has its own prejudices, selfishness, and cruelty. Those faults are part cultural momentum and part human nature. Biological reproduction is not progress.

I hope that the misguided ideas from Death's advocates never turn into public policy. They target our worship of youth, and blame the older generations for racism, sexism, and all that's wrong with society. We mock the right-wing delusion of death panels, but the T-rex in the comic is talking about the real deal: condemning people to death for the sake of social progress. Not just old people, but ourselves, and our future children too.

Yes, I am taking a web comic too seriously.

Would you ever choose to kill yourself?

Would you ever choose to kill yourself?

That was a loaded question. Most people would say "No, of course not. Life is too precious."

Would you choose to live forever?

Surprisingly, many people would say "No. Living forever would be boring and pointless." Or they may give another reason - people have come up with many ways of justifying their mortality.



Do those questions set up a false dichotomy? Right now, you don't have to kill yourself to find death - age and disease and accidents will take care of it eventually. But some day, science might provide us with solutions for each of those problems; there may be a cure for aging. Aubrey de Grey and other researchers are convinced that they will find a way.

When there exists a choice for immortality, isn't choosing the alternative equivalent to choosing death?

Think of it this way: Every year on your birthday, you receive a small package in the mail. You unwrap it, and inside is a red pill. There's a card there that explains what everybody already knows: If you take this pill, you will live another year, completely healthy and active and free of diseases, guaranteed. If you don't take the pill, you may die within the year.

One year, you feel depressed, or bored, or just sick of it all, and you decide to flush the pill down the toilet. At the end of the year, you're still alive and healthy. And the next year too. You get suspicious, and call the number on the back of the card.

It turns out that all those red pills are actually placebos. The only real pill was the first one you took on your 18th birthday - that one has already made you immortal.

After the call, you receive a package in the mail. It contains a blue pill; if you take the blue pill, you will die. Not immediately, but inevitably, you will die.

Would you take the blue pill?

How can you learn to walk if you never fall down?

Nobody gets it right the first time; not even robots. This video inspired the following story.

It's 2 AM and Kimiko had been coding for 6 hours straight. She was about to make a breakthrough, but it would carry with it a painful mistake.

Compile.
Upload.
Run.

***

The project was conceived in a moment of inspired laziness. Every time the robot Asimo tripped over an obstacle, or lost its balance, or took a mis-programmed step, it would fall down, clattering on the cold floor. And every time, Kimiko struggled to help it back up. Asimo weighed over a hundred pounds with its power pack - almost as much as she did. If only it could get up by itself!

More than human

In the olden days, people use to think that the Earth was at the center of the Universe. They thought that their particular city or country was at the center of the world. All of their maps were drawn this way, but this isn't just a matter of convenience - it was an outlook, a philosophy. People are by nature self-centered and narcissistic beings.

Today, some people believe that human beings are the end-product, the apex of billions of years of evolution.  Again, it's not a matter of convenience, but an actual perception of biological history. The cartoon above (parody of the iconic illustration by Rudolph Zallinger) shows a progression from ape to modern man. It presents evolution as an inevitable ascension toward the top: us. This view is false. Though we can trace our own lineage back to proto-apes, and though there are no surviving semi-human species, evolution is not directed, and it does not have an end-goal. We are merely an extremely successful species among millions of others.

There's no reason to believe that the homo sapiens is the final step. The optimist tells me that we are not a dead end species either. No, there will be a next step; we will become more than human. Once we embrace that idea, only one question remains:

How long?

Epic Showdown: American power armor vs Japanese cyborg exoskeleton

We need to make this fight happen.

On the right: the XOS combat chassis, developed by Raytheon Sarcos to augment the American soldier of the future; can bench 200 lb weights till he gets bored; flexible enough to go up and down steep inclines, and strong enough to punch your head clean off. May come with bulletproof armor plating and sharp stabbing hooks. Available exclusively to the military. (video)

On the left: HAL exoskeleton, developed by Cyberdine and Japanese roboticist Dr. Sankai; can lift a paralyzed man to the summit of the Swiss Alps; carries your grandmother down the stairs; controlled by nerve impulses; helps paralyzed or weakened people to walk again. Comes with a 5 hour battery. Anyone can rent this for $2000 a month! (video, video)

Who do you think would win in this fight? Obviously, the killer military machine, right? Don't be so sure. Doesn't the HAL suit remind you of something? Maybe a story that we all know and love:

A gawky and oppressed teen finds shiny robotic suit. It transforms nerd into superhero. He stops criminals and saves babies and rescues stranded commuters. At the end, he faces down the nasty bully who has been slapping him around for years, and somehow the bully had gotten hold of the battlesuit that looks like a Terminator. It's David vs. Goliath. I think we all know how that fight should turn out.

This scenario brings up the issue of image and narrative. We have learned so many associations and stories that we can't help but draw connections when we contact something new. A piece of technology is not just a collection of functions; it speaks to us, to our subconscious. Apple, for example, is a master of this technique: merging function with personality.

If we hope to make smooth strides in living with any new forms of technology, we should pay attention to the public perception of it.

Article: Cyborg Exoskeletons May Soon Become as Common as Bicycles