Our Two Cents On More Senses

Are we limited by the senses we've evolved or can we extend them? From sensing magnetic fields to seeing in the dark, we look at how humans in the future may have a better idea of what's going on.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey that everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says you
want to fill up my senses like a night in
the forest. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bock Obama, and

(00:21):
I'm Joe McCormick. So, hey, guys, I wanna bombard your
brains with a little bit of weirdness. Do you ever
think about the fact that the way the world looks
to you is not necessarily how the world actually is?
And I'm not trying to get all philosophical like what
is reality or anything like that. No, I'm trying to

(00:44):
comment actually on the nature of the way we perceive.
And I'm not saying that your eyes don't give you
accurate information about the world, because they do a pretty
good job of creating a model of reality that's useful
for us. All our brain messes it up a little
bit in translation, but sure, yeah, yeah sometimes. But what
I'm talking about is that the model of reality created

(01:06):
by light through our eyes, as interpreted by our brains,
is not the only way to create an accurate model
of the physical world. Rights necessarily limited. I mean, when
we talk about the visible spectrum of light, that immediately
tells you that there is a spectrum that is not
visible to us. So if we were able to see

(01:29):
the entire spectrum of light, the world would look very different.
So knowing that there are entire sections of light, and
that's just one of our senses, right, We've got plenty
of senses. We're gonna be talking about this episode of
our primaries. It's one of those ones that's easy to
talk about. It's it means that our perception of the
world around us is by necessity limited, and that there's

(01:50):
stuff going on all over the place that we just
cannot even perceive. Yeah, we've got only a small wedge
of any given spectrum of stuff that we can take
in by our senses. Yeah. Well, what you bring up
there is that there are ways of creating models of
reality that don't even necessarily use light. Right, they don't
use electromagnetic radiation like you could use sound, or you

(02:13):
could maybe interpret the world in terms of chemicals. Right,
if you had really chemo receptors, like maybe a very
strong sense of smell could actually let you determine the
relative locations of objects around you exactly. So in this episode,
we wanted to explore the idea of augmenting our senses,

(02:35):
perhaps extending our senses so that we have new ones
beyond the ones we already have, so not just boosting
the ones we have already, the ones that everyone is
familiar with. Are are familiar with, and you can use
a telescope to see farther that's that's a no brain
or you could use uh, you know, other other technology
to allow you to see things that you normally couldn't see.

(02:56):
For example, night vision goggles allow you to see at night,
and we're gonna talk a little bit about some other
technologies that might allow that sort of thing too, in
various ways. Basically, we want to focus on the eventual
possibility of radically augmenting the way we create models of
the physical world with our brains. So I guess we

(03:18):
should start by talking about the senses we already have.
And one of the cool facts about our bodies is
that you have way more senses than you realize or
probably realized. Well, it's more than just those five senses
that we all learned about and say kindergarten, right, Although
some argue that these other senses will be talking about
somehow are wrapped up in one or more senses. So

(03:42):
it all depends upon who who's doing the talking. Right.
In some cases you have someone saying, no, there are
no x number of senses that are way more than five,
and other people would say, well, let's be fair, three
or four of the ones you mentioned are really wrapped
up in the five five big ones. But it all
is ongoing debate, and it again depends really from your

(04:03):
point of view. But yes, it is more complicated than
just saying, what is a site? Smell? There's also what that?
There's a taste, there's that touch and hearing. Right, let's
talk the big five, all right, what is site? Okay,
that's that's seeing. It's also no, I know that it's
also does it Workalmo exception? That's what it's also called

(04:27):
Falmo exception? That it sells in your eyes that are
that are sensitive to light. Yeah, yeah, and so and
so yeah, to photons, right, and so they absorbed photons
and send a signal to your brain and tell it
some stuff. Yea, the brain. The brain actually does a
lot of the work here. So we've got essentially photo receptors.
So kind of similar to what you would think of

(04:47):
in any kind of light sensor. It's it's the organic
equivalent to that. So you have these photoreceptors, you've got
rods and cones. They are able to do different things. Um,
and the number that you have will determine what kind
of site you have based on from organism to organism,
because different organisms have different arrays. Right, So something like
a bird of prey has much keener sight than say,

(05:11):
a human being does. Other animals may have vision that
is not nearly as strong as what a human being has,
but at any rate, we have these photoreceptor cells that
can detect light that's coming. They're able to see these
visible images from the visible light spectrum, lights bouncing off
of stuff right into our eyes. That sends the little

(05:31):
electrical impulses to our brain, which then can interpret it
and turn that into what we consider images. Yeah, and
the way things look to us really are just ways
our brain makes sense of different pieces of data. So
like when you see two different colors, the the actual
physical data difference there is that you've got different wavelengths

(05:53):
of light coming into your eyes. Yeah, which is why
I blame everybody else for saying I'm not devastatingly handsome,
because it's really how they're constructing me in their brains,
not me. It's nothing. They don't realize how green you are. Yeah,
it's uh, it's a constant source of irritation. But no, no,
so that. But this again, this kind of illustrates this idea,

(06:13):
and not to get again to philosophical or metaphysical, but
this idea that a lot of what we consider reality
is this construct that's happening in our minds. It's it's
our brains being able to interpret all the information, the
data that's coming in. It's making sense of it. It's
not that the data doesn't reflect something real, but the
way we put it together is a simulation going on

(06:34):
in the brain. Yeah, yeah, so interesting there. Next, we've
got in our our notes here we have smell the
alpha conception. That's just one way of spelling it. I
think it's old facco exception, all faccoception, there's all Well,
there's actually three or four different spellings of it, and
it all depends upon the spelling. There's some that have
no O in it. Disclaimer. Now, a lot of the

(06:56):
single word names for some of these senses have different
spell things and stuff. So don't write in correcting us.
We know right right, we just don't know how to
say them. So that's that part you can write in
about you don't know how to say this. Yes, what
happens in your nose? All right? You got these receptors,
so molecular receptors in your nose that think of them

(07:17):
as sort of it's like a key and lock situation.
You have these receptors that bind with certain moleculear molecular shapes, right,
So when those molecules make contact with those receptors, then
you have a signal sent to the brain that says
AD that is X smell. So you have hundreds of
different types of receptors in your in your nose, joe uh,

(07:42):
in any given persons, if any given persons knows. Now, granted,
if you were to look at say, other animals, they
have maybe a wider range and a lot more of them.
Dogs have like two twenty million of these receptor cells,
not different types, but in across the various range of types,

(08:03):
And so the number determines how well you can smell,
how how well you can detect an odor to no
matter how faint the smell might be like how little
of that molecule might be in the atmosphere. Maybe how
little of a difference you can tell? Yeah, yeah, and
then so yeah, the kinds that we have, the different
molecules which represent different smells can bind to those different receptors.

(08:27):
That sends the signal to our brain very much the
way the light can makes a nerve impulse go to
our brain and our brain interprets it. So when you
stop and smell the roses, the molecules you're inhaling are
binding too specific receptors in your nasal passages. Essentially, we're
talking like little neurons firing off. Let's talk about a

(08:48):
related sense, taste, Taste. Yeah, taste and smell are very
closely related. In fact, taste and smell together are what
allows us to detect flavor. Right, Because taste and flavor
are two different things, a lot of us kind of
equate the two. Sure, but um, I mean that's the
reason if, for example, you've ever been sick and noticed
that food tastes very different when your nose is stuffed up,

(09:10):
this is why, right, exactly. Yeah, And there are so
many times where I've been sick and there's certain things
that the tastes are very simple or the flavors are
very simple. I should say the flavors are very simple,
and therefore the taste is not that different, and I
go with it. So something like tomato soup or chicken
noodle soup tend to have very simple flavors and so
you don't lose a whole lot in translation. Well, it's

(09:32):
also your your tongue is really good at receiving certain chemicals, like,
for example, salt is something that's hard to smell but
very easy to taste, and so that's something that that's
why salty food like like chicken broth is is kind
of fine for for it doesn't taste that weird, right, Right, So,
like you were saying, we have these sensory receptors that

(09:53):
buying two very specific types of molecules very much kind
of like the smell. In this case, you have the
bay taste, which include these sweet, better sour, salty, and
then oh mommy or savory. Yeah, so this is these
smell and taste would both be sort of a form
of chemo seption, right, sensing chemicals exactly. Yeah. So this

(10:16):
is where with a site, we've got light when you
talk about hearing or touch, you're talking about actual physical experiences.
Because sound a sound is sound is motion. Really, it's
it's motion of molecules in the air that are colliding
with each other. If there weren't that motion, for example,
if you were in the space in a vacuum, then

(10:38):
you wouldn't hear anything because there'll be nothing to move
and therefore nothing to stimulate your your sense of hearing,
because your sense of hearing depends upon little tiny follicles,
follicle like structures that vibrate when they come into contact
with these moving molecules, that then continue to send signals
further on. Like in human ears, we have these delicate

(11:01):
bones that then end up pressing against uh kind of
a chamber that's filled with fluid that has other little
cilia type hairs in it sounds beautiful, yeah, And and
the motion, the motion of the fluid within that chamber
moves the cilia, which then send the electrical signals to
your brain, which you then interpret as sound. A lot

(11:22):
of a lot of similar things here. Your your favorite
music is really just all hairs in fluid. Fluid and fluid,
by the way, is the name of my guar cover band. Yeah,
so don't steal it. Okay, what about touch, the last
one in the big five? Yeah, tect the reception. Okay,
so we're talking about neural receptors that are along things

(11:44):
like under your skin, hair follicles, another good example. This
is mostly detecting changes in pressure. So when you press
up against something that those changes in pressure, what you
detect that ends up turning to these again nerve impulses
that get sent to your central nervous system and then

(12:04):
get interpreted by Mr. Braining as Oh that's what that is?
Why Mr Brain? Why not brain or mrs brain? Really?
How about dr brain? Dr brain? A dr brain? My
brain isn't that smart most days? Right? Okay? How about
this though? Did you know you've got senses that don't

(12:26):
even make the top five? We we alluded to this earlier.
How about this one, which I think is really cool.
Everybody sort of knows they have it, but they don't
think to distinguish it. It's called Approprioception comes from approprio,
the idea of one's own sense, yes, sense of one's
own body, as in, you are you know where your
body parts are in relation to each other, even without

(12:49):
other senses getting in the way, right, try a little
experiment here. Okay, close your eyes and clap your hands.
I hit the mic. No, but probably most to the time,
you can do this. Why can you do this? Why
can you see? You can tell where your hands are
in relationship to each other without looking at them. Yeah, yeah,
it's this, it's this sense, this ability for us to

(13:13):
uh to figure out where our body parts are. Another
example one that's commonly given in in lecture halls when
they talk about the source of stuff or just even
just grade school, that kind of thing. Close your eyes
and attempt to touch your own nose, and that again
shows that you are aware of the position of where
your nose is, where your finger is in relation to

(13:33):
the nose, even while it's moving and then ending up someplace.
You're able to process all of that without any sort
of visual stimulation. Right. If you've taken a drug or
had an injury that has impaired your sense of appropriate reception,
you might have trouble doing these things without looking at
what you're doing. Sure. Yeah, so that's a pretty cool one,

(13:55):
this idea of uh, you know. And and again it's
one of those things where do you call it a
sense and there's some people who argue about the sense.
I think so too. But Joe, there are people who don't.
I'm not saying that I don't Joe, don't get offended.
I don't know I think that anyone who's I mean,
it's you. You juggle, Jonathan, and and and that's kind
of how you how you make that happen. You have
to know where your hands are without looking at Yeah,

(14:16):
you can actually get to a point and once you
get used to it, you can get to a point
where you can maintain eye contact with other people and
have a conversation and still continue to juggle. It's easier
for me to to do it that way than to
actually watch what I'm doing. If I watch what I'm doing,
I freak out and drop everything nice, humble, where yell. Look.
I don't juggle a lot, but when I do, it's

(14:38):
on fire and it's sharp. Speaking of things that are
on fire and sharp, how about no susception? A sense
of pain? Yeah, this is a sense of pain, which
people believe is actually independent from your sense of touch,
So you use different it's a different neural system exactly
in this case. Pain comes in various varieties. Anyone who's

(15:03):
been fortunate enough to experience these knows them well. If
you've juggled flaming machetes, yeah, since you can. You can
divide these into pain that you sense along your skin,
pain that is in your your joints or your bones,
and pain that's in your internal organs. Um. I'm sure
we've all experienced these to some degree or another. Pain

(15:24):
is essentially the body's way of a detecting a threat
and telling you, hey, you should probably get away from that.
Something is getting damaged, so stop what you're doing and
don't do it anymore. Right. So, Now, obviously there are
some types of injuries that end up impairing this. For example,
if you were to suffer a truly serious burn, talking

(15:45):
like third degree burn, then it can be so bad
that it ends up frying the destroying so then you
could end up not feeling the pain until it's really
a terrible injury. But in general, this is an effective
warning system. It really gives you a an incentive to
stop doing whatever it is that's causing the problem. This

(16:06):
is also a sense that can be impaired on its own,
and people can be unable to feel certain types of pain,
and this can actually be dangerous. It sounds like a
cool thing, but it's not something you want, right because
if you are unable to feel pain, then you also
may be unaware if you are suffering a type of injury.
You might be leaning against a hot stove and burning

(16:27):
your skin and you don't even know, right, or you
could be freezing, you know, it's another temperature. Temperature sensing
is a little different from pain sensing, but because we
also have that is our their most their most sception.
But but it can also lead to sensing pain, depending
upon if it's reaching a yeah, I have a question, Sure,

(16:48):
what's the sense that lets me know whether or not
I'm upside down? Equiliberal exception, which is that's that's when
you uh, that's more to do with that inner ear
fluid of yours. Yes, yeah, your woe is more of
a matrixception. Equilibrium was an excellent movie and very similar
to the Matrix. I wouldn't call that an excellent movie

(17:09):
the matrix anyway. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna have a
nerd fight when we get out of this one. Equilibrio reception. Alright,
so the tune into our past nerd fights. We keep
we keep threatening to do that, and who knows, maybe
one day that will happen. Uh, equilibrio reception. Yeah, this
is the sense of balance. You're You're right, it is, Lauren.
It does involve the inner ear because partially partially yeah,

(17:30):
because we're we're talking about being able to detect things
like angular momentum and acceleration, linear momentum and acceleration, and
being able to to maintain our sense of balance even
as we move around. I mean, anyone who has ever
just I mean just just being able to walk like
you need that sense of balance in order to be
able to do that. If if you were only standing

(17:50):
perfectly still in the same orientation for your entire life,
wouldn't be so important. But we like to move around,
and we encounter environments that are not always perfectly level
or perfectly stationary, and so obviously we need to have
that sense of balance to be able to to navigate that.
Of course, the cool thing about that is you're actually
not detecting movement. You're detecting acceleration or deceleration, because we're

(18:15):
always moving on the Earth and we don't feel that. Yes, well,
we're used to it. If we were, if we were
feeling the rotation and and the revolution of the earth
around the sun. We probably never stopped screaming, all right, good,
good point, Jonathan. Just think we'd be like, I can't
do anything else because I'm too business. There's so many

(18:36):
good reasons to never stop screaming. Oh my goodness, gracious. Okay,
but yeah, there are other senses that we could talk about.
You know, there's your sense of hunger, there's your sense
of thirst. There's senses that we have internally that relate
to various types of experiences we could have. Some would
argue that some of them are related to things like

(18:57):
temperature or pain. It all depends upon again, who's doing
the talking, right, Yeah, and I guess there are some
we we still might have questions about, Like does it
make sense to call chronoception the sense of the passage
of time a sense? Is that a sense? Or is
that yeah? Or is that just a short term and
long term memory interaction. Yeah, it's the way that we codify,

(19:19):
especially considering that our memories are are very very very fallible,
right that that, uh, we're malleable or both malleables. And yeah,
it's an even better way of putting it. Lauren because
as we well, it is. I would call it ductile.
I call it plastic, all right. At any rate, Look, Joe,

(19:39):
you're very smart too. I don't I don't mean to,
I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Stuff. I love you both,
all right, You're both my favorite so anyway, but yeah, yeah,
memory is malleable. Memory can change. We can We've known this,
like we know that I witness testimony in court cases,
while it tends to bear a lot of weight among jurors,

(20:01):
is not terribly reliable because our memories are not not
even close to reliable. Okay, I want to get to
other senses, and by other I mean beyond human senses.
So these are senses that you might find in other organisms,
but not in human beings. Well, you might find them
in some very small way in human beings, but not

(20:24):
in a really appreciable sense, not in a way that
would be of any real use to the average person.
Although we have some exceptions with a couple of these,
the first one we want to talk about, magneto reception,
might be different. This is how you are able to
sense X Men comic books, Magneto reception or magneto reception.

(20:45):
Magneto reception or whatever you want to say. It's the
way an organism senses magnetic fields. This is one that
I think there's some controversy over the extent to which
this is present in humans. But we don't have a
very strong of magneto reception, if we have any at all. Yeah,
there's some people who argue that if you were to say,

(21:05):
live near power lines where you have a lot of
alternating current, that could end up making you not feel well,
which would suggest that there would be some sort of
magneto reception mechanism going on there, But double blind studies
don't seem to bear that out yet. I mean, mostly
the research that I've read has suggested that in many organisms, um,

(21:27):
and end result of being exposed to magnetic fields is
a subproduction of calcium ions which which can which can
affect your your your overall health and well being. Um.
But that's like super not tested research, I mean, and
it's also not something that you would necessarily like detect

(21:48):
the presence of a magnetic field. You'd be affected by
the presence, right. Well, another thing that might be there
is like, well, what if humans can use some in
a sort of very subcon just magnetic information to help
them navigate. Like people who are good at finding their
way around, there are some animals who can seriously do

(22:09):
that really well, yeah, like like uncannily for reals. I mean,
this is what allows birds that migrate to in some
cases migrate from the north pole to the south pole
every year, right, ridiculous. Well, it's because the Earth generates
its own magnetic field. And if you know that, well
maybe not. No, let's just let's not talk about cognition.

(22:31):
But you're a bird that needs to go north at
a certain time of the year, needs to go south
at a different time of the year, and you have
something going on in your brain and nervous system that
that triggers that instinct. Okay, now is the time to
follow this magnetic signal? Right there? As I recall in
the novel version of Jurassic Park, actually the dinosaurs yeah,

(22:54):
and so they align themselves with the magnetic fields because
and which proved one of the scientists theory, and he
got all excited about it even as he was also
about to dinosaurs. Yeah, alright, So how does it work
in birds? Uh? Research indicates that that it's vision based
and light dependent. Um that that birds can only orient

(23:17):
themselves magnetically if blue wavelengths of light are present. Um
that the hypothesis here again this has not proven, is
that birds see magnetic fields perhaps is as like dark
or bright spots in their vision that move in pattern
as the bird scans a scene. Uh, which is also
which also falls in line with the way that we
watch birds behave when they're when they're migrating. That's pretty cool.

(23:40):
So I remember reading about this when I was writing
the video script. Is this cool idea that birds could
actually see the magnetic fields like a grid over the
vision that they have of normal light reflective, which is
pretty cool. Like I would have I would have first
imagined it to be more of a sense of touch,
just just if I were thinking of this without any
extra without the information here, If you had just told me,

(24:03):
how do you think it happens? I would have thought, Oh,
it's probably some sort of feeling thing. It wouldn't have
occurred to me that it was a visual possibly a
visual thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They think it might have
to do with like the spins of entangled electrons and
molecule pairs inside the bird's eyes. I mean, I mean,
if you want to dumb it down for everything. But yeah,

(24:24):
I mean obviously they are not. The birds are not
the only animals that have used magnetic fields to help navigate. No,
what about bees? Yeah, yeah, well there's there's lots. There's salmon,
sea turtles, spotted newts, lobsters, and fruit flies. I'll also
do this. But but bees are a really interesting example
because there's been a lot of research done into both

(24:47):
bees and birds actually in the past decade or so.
Um and yeah, bees can even be trained to respond
in certain ways if they send a magnetic field training bees.
I want to do that so much. Um. I love bees. Okay, So,
so Halo player accurate. Um. So, researchers think that that
the sense works like this. So, so, the bees produce

(25:08):
an iron oxide called called magnetite in their bodies, and
that magnetite gets stored in nanoparticle form inside a type
of cell called a trophosyte um. And in the presence
of a magnetic field, the particles either group together or
move apart. And and at this size of particle that
the process is called super paramagnetism. That's your word of

(25:28):
the day in case you ever need that one. Um, good,
good ten cent word. But so these these changes in
particle size trigger the release of those calcium ions that
I was talking about earlier, and they react with other
stuff in the cell and initiate this this neural response.
Interesting and also, of course, as I see here, we've
we've got a little note about bug senses that go

(25:50):
beyond the magneto reception and also just into other peculiarities
of their site. Yeah yeah, um so so bees, butterflies
and law of other insects can see polarized light, which
is not a thing that humans can see. It means
that they can navigate by the sun's position even when
it's cloudy. Um. They think that it comes from a

(26:12):
certain type of ibit. Inside of insects come compound eyes
because most insects have several pairs of eyes, and and
so that the compound ones have lots of little repeating parts,
and some of them contain these specialized photo receptors. I
want to I'm going to try and say the word.

(26:32):
I didn't look it up, So amatidia sounds great to me.
That's that's that's the name of the ibit. Yeah, that's
pretty cool. And then it's my favorite ibit. So another
this this Also, this is not something that's necessarily a
replacement of a sense, but it's a very uh specific
use of a sense. Echolocation which involves two things, right.

(26:53):
It involves making a sound, a particular sound, and then
being able to hear that sound, and from that base uh,
the the making of the sound and hearing the echo
come back, you are able to detect how far away
something is from you. Uh. And there are certain animals
that depend heavily upon echolocation in order to get around

(27:14):
or to uh to catch food. Yeah. You think about
the way bats hunt insects at night in the dark,
or how about the way that ocean dwelling mammals hunt
like dolphins and whales. A lot of those use echolocation
to travel through the waves until it finds some delicious
fish and then they say thanks for all the fish,
and then they leave the earth. Uh. The bats use

(27:37):
very very high pitched sounds that are beyond usually beyond
the range of human hearing, so we're talking hypersonic type
sounds that are uh, they're very high frequency. It also
allows them to get incredible precision on on when they're
hearing echoes back, which is why they're able to use
it to locate something as small as an insect that's
flying in the air, and they're even able to compensate

(27:59):
for the Doppler effect, so that if they are flying
toward an insect and they get that echo back, they're
able to take into account this the fact that they
are moving, the insect is moving, and still know where
that insect is in relation to where they are, which
is pretty cool when you think about it. That's that's
a very complex sort of thing. Now, granted, this is

(28:19):
not something that the bats are necessarily knowing they it's
just this adaptation. Well, it goes into the way that
obviously we don't know what it's like to be a
bat or a dolphin. We can't be in that brain.
But Bruce Wayne does. Whatever these animals are creating in
their head, there's somehow using this information to create a

(28:40):
model of reality that's pretty accurate the way that we
do with our eyes. Even though it's not the only
way to see. At least it's accurate enough to say
food is right over there. I want that food. I'm
going to go get it. Yeah, So yeah, that's interesting. Now,
what's also interesting is that we have some some incidents
of humans using a kind of echolocation to get around

(29:03):
unaided echolocation. We'll talk about techno echolocation later on, but
some people actually learn to do this without technology. Yeah,
they make a noise and then they can hear the
difference the noise the noise they're making it. It's supposed
to be a consistent noise of some sort, even if
they're singing a scale, it's their voice doing it, or
if they're making a whistle noise or they're making a

(29:25):
click there. They they know what the sound sounds like normally,
and then they catch the echo as they get closer
and closer to And so you have people who have
vision impairments who have used this sort of technique and
they're able to navigate things like hallways. But really anyone
who's who's capable of hearing is able to do this.

(29:47):
It's really just training your brain to to recognize the
discrepancy exactly. I'd imagine you could never train it to
nearly the level of tuning that it would be in
like a dolphin or a back. We wouldn't be able
to produce nor hear the pitch of sounds that would
give us that level of incredible detail, but we'd be
able to tell things like if you're coming close to

(30:08):
an obstacle or if something's coming towards you. So the
example I saw online about how you could test this
yourself is that if you have a friend that you trust,
that part's important. But let's say your friend holds up
a frying pan, uh in front of your face, and

(30:30):
so first you just make make a noise like maybe
your make clicking your tongue or something along those lines, uh,
where there's nothing in front of you, and then your
friend puts said frying pan in front of your face.
You have your eyes closed. You can't tell otherwise that
this is happening. When you'd make that clicking noise, you
would hear the difference. And by learning that difference, by

(30:51):
learning how that would sound different, you would know, Oh,
I'm approaching some sort of obstacle that's blocking some of
the sound, that's making it sound different to me. It's
a little different. It's not, like I said, not as
precise as we're seeing in the animal world, but but
still worse. Well, I mean, you know it's it's we
We don't need to find insects with our voices for survivals.

(31:12):
So we we have not. Most of us depend so
heavily on vision that we haven't developed that skill set. Right.
I've got another crazy one for you. How about chemo
receptors in skin. So, so you mean like tasting with
things other than our our our tongue are smelling things
for them. That's exactly what I mean. So I don't

(31:33):
want to taste things with my hands, but you do.
You so do because then you'd be like kind of
like a catfish. So we think that some fish might
have chemo receptors on exterior skin surfaces. In other words,
it's basically like having taste buds on your body. And
there's a reason that we talk about fish there, because,

(31:54):
especially when you live in the water, being able to
detect what chemicals are passing through the water around you,
or say lying along the bottom of a stream bed
might be really important to helping you find food, find mates,
find whatever it is. Yeah, however, for humans, just think

(32:14):
of the door knob, guys, do I don't. I don't
like thinking about door knobs to begin with. I'm not
really germophobic. I I think you're being unfair here because
the reason you don't want to taste door knobs is
because you don't want to lick door knobs because you
might be ingesting germs. But what if you could taste
the door knob without necessarily getting all jeermany Joe Josh

(32:37):
Clark uses the same podcast, Sweet, I do not want
to taste that door knob. You're probably tasting his microphone
right now. Oh that's that's pretty accurate. Okay. How about
heat vision? That's another one. You mean, like Superman, where
can zap stuff? No? No, no, I mean although we
all know that space cats have eye lasers. A lot
of comic book references for me today, Sorry, guys. Okay,

(32:59):
so we can already sense heat in a certain way.
We sense heat with our skin obviously feeling sort of
intense temperature differences. And heat is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It's it's just at a range that we cannot see
with our eyeballs. Right. Well, yeah, so heat is thermal energy,
and thermal energy any object with the temperature, so imagine

(33:22):
something like a human body or a recently dead monster
or so has suffered a terrible face. Everything is technically
everything that is above absolute zero is technically radiating some
form of heat. Even if it feels to us very cold.
It just matters whate or not. It's radiating more heat

(33:43):
than the ambient environmental temperature, right right, Well, whatever it is,
it's emitting thermal radiation and those waves can be found
on the infrared spectrum. So the infrared spectrum is made
of longer wavelengths of light than the light that's normally
visible to humans. So we can't normally see infrared, but
if we could, we could basically see differences in temperature,

(34:06):
like predator. So there you go, Predator. Some real animals, however,
are basically already predator. Uh BoA's Pythons and snakes in
the viper subfamily crotalin A, also known as pit vipers,
are able to detect heat via infrared radiation. So these
snakes have pit organs located between the eyes and the

(34:28):
nostrils on their little snake faces. The organs consist of
membranes that are sensitive to radiation on the infrared spectrum.
So the pits help the snakes see the body heat
of the prey and they can zero in to make
a strike even in the darkness. That's that's really cool
and scary, pretty intense. Yeah, So wait a minute, why

(34:50):
don't we just normally see light on the infrared spectrum. Well,
apparently there would be a conflict there. If we could
see infrared light, apparently it would or whelm our eyes
and we would be unable to see all the normal
light that we need in order to navigate the day
to day world where we're back to. Wouldn't stop screaming
kind of territory. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. It'd be.

(35:12):
You know, if you want to use a different sense,
it would be like our sense of hearing. If you
went into a room where there were just multiple loud
sources of noise and you were trying to concentrate on
something someone was saying, and that's what your experience was
all the time, it would be very difficult to ever
hear anything. Yeah, okay, I got another one. This is

(35:32):
crazy electro reception. I'm not going to make a spider
Man joke. If you are a fan of Shark Week,
you probably know about this one. This is the ability
to sense electrical currents in one's environment. So sharks can
do this. Certain fish can do this. It's common in
uh animals that dwell in the water, typically seawater, which

(35:54):
makes sense because even the water is resistant to electrical current.
It's more conductive than air, especially seawater because as salt
in it, and those ions make it easier for the
electricity to travel. So sharks, for example, use electro reception
organs called ampulated Lorenzini. These are little dots around the
shark's face, around the base of the jaw that detected

(36:16):
the movement of live prey and water via electrical signals.
So the receptors are sensitive to tiny changes in voltage
that are caused by say the heartbeat of a fish
or the flapping muscle movement of efficious fins, and that
that transmits its electricity through the water, and the sharks
are really sensitive. Christen Conger wrote a good article about

(36:37):
this for us to Works. She says in her article
that sharks can sense changes in electrical current down to
one billionth of a volt. That would be one nano volt.
Well said, with authority, it's a really beautiful sense. I'm
a little bit obsessed with this one. Some some baby
sharks developed this before they're even born, and they can
use the sense to avoid detection by possible predators that

(36:59):
they'll be an. These little shark egg sact things and
they'll instinctually hold still if they sense something big nearby. Wow. Yeah,
not so useful if you're in an environment that is
not electrically conductive. Right, So, could we use this, well,
we'll we'll talk about that in a minute when we
when we talk about technological amplification of senses. Uh So,

(37:22):
one last thing I just wanted to talk about is
that these ways of creating internal pictures of the world
are useful because of the environments we live in here
on Earth and because of the laws of physics more broadly,
but just as one example, the wavelengths of light that
we call the visible spectrum. So all the colors you
can see with your eyes, they're just wavelengths. I mean,

(37:45):
they could be any wavelengths, but it's good for us
to see at those wavelengths because those are the wavelengths
that penetrate our atmosphere. Radio frequencies also do, but a
lot of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum don't make it
down to the surface of the Earth, right, So those
things coming down from the sunlight actually make it here.
We can see them reflect off things, and that's why

(38:06):
it's good for us to see those surfaces but what
if we'd evolved on a world where the most abundant
radiation from the sun was ultra violet? Or what if
you could imagine a creature that could see radio waves.
They'd go bonkers here because based upon all the WiFi, bluetooth,
broadcast signals, not to mention just the natural radio waves

(38:29):
that are emitted by stuff like stars and and other
other sources. Uh, it'd probably a little overwhelming. Yeah, well,
I mean, I guess I'd imagine that, like the way
we experienced light, they wouldn't see the waves themselves, but
they'd see them reflected off of surfaces. Yeah, still would
be pretty crazy, Yeah, totally. Okay, So let's talk body hacking. Okay, sure,

(38:55):
so we're talking about let's say that I want to
be more like one of these animals or a predator
or something like that. I want to be a shark,
I want to be a spider, I want to be
a predator. All these things have things, because all the
best things to be have thangs. Yeah, what what if
I want to do? Actually, let's start with the cuter things,
birds and bees. What if I want to be like

(39:16):
a bird or a sea turtle or a bee and
use a magnetic sense to make a model of reality
in my head. Well, Joe, one thing you could do,
though I don't recommend it, is to surgically implant a
small permanent magnet on the tip of one of your fingers,
preferably the ring finger on your non dominant hand, in

(39:38):
case something should go terribly wrong and you lose all
feeling in that finger. You talk as if you've read
about people doing this, I, in fact have read about
people doing this. So yeah, bio hackers also known as
grinders or depending on where you're from, hogs or subways, um. So,
bio hackers have been known to perform a little surgery

(40:00):
on themselves or to have you know, a body modification
person performance surgery. We should stress right now we're not
advocating this, not at all, and it's generally illegal in
most places. Yeah, because even body modification folks, it's not
like they are necessarily trained in things like surgery. Uh
and and most surgeons, most actual you know, surgical surgical

(40:23):
doctors that you could go and visit and say a
hospital or other office won't do these things because it's
not necessarily considered ethical. So I don't know if there's
no license to doctor who will do it, but I
have found no evidence of one who will. Well, it's
it's not generally deemed medically necessary, and the potential to
do harm outweighs therefore the potential for good almost almost immediately. Yeah,

(40:46):
it's one of those things where you say, look until
there's some best practices that are established for this sort
of thing. It's an unnecessary and unnecessarily risky endeavor. So
but the idea is that you use a small permanent magnet,
powerful permanent magnetic neodymium and neodymium being a prime example.
Get a small magnet and implanted just under the skin,

(41:10):
like I said, usually on the ring finger of the
non dominant hand. You'd probably want to code it in
some kind of nonreactive plastic coating like parallene, which is
what they use to say, put a pacemaker in your body.
There's a lot of stuff in your body that could
end up corroding various materials, or you could end up
having an allergic reaction to stuff, or your body could

(41:30):
just end up thinking of it as an infection and
trying to find it off. But so, once once it's
in there, what what does that what does that do alright?
So well messes up your computer screen. Yeah, you don't
want to don't want to put your finger too close
to any any screens that require that. So what it
does is allows you to detect magnetic fields or electric fields,
because we know there's that that electromagnetic forces right there.

(41:52):
There's that close relationship between electric electric electricity, I guess
I should say, and magnetism. So if you have a
fluctuating electric field, then you're going to detect it whenever
you come near it. If it's a static electric field,
and you will detect it when you come into range,
but then it would probably it would stop pulling. Well,
I mean, I mean by detect, you mean you're you're

(42:12):
you're going to feel the magnet, the magnet being pulled.
It'll vibrate a little bit, depending upon what sort of
magnetic or electric field you're coming into contact with, right,
they say, with like big powerful electric fields, if it's
direct current, you feel a tug. If it's alternating current,
you feel a vibration. Yeah, they say that this is crazy.
If you get near anything like say a microwave of

(42:36):
it while it's turned on, so you'd be able to
feel that of course, if you came into contact with
any magnets you could you would feel the tug. If
it was a powerful magnet, you could feel being stuck
to it. Um. If it's a powerful enough electro magnet,
like say in a m R I, you could suffer
some serious damage. So that would be one thing you

(42:58):
would have to let anyone know that you have this
magnet in your body if you were to go in
for like an m r I scan, because otherwise you
could cause some pretty serious havoc inside the machine. Yeah,
but the idea is that it extends our senses so
that when you come into contact with these things, which
normally we would be unaware of. Right, we would normally

(43:20):
not notice it unless something on us reacted to it.
Now we've got something. You could have something in you
that would react to this, something that's particularly sensitive to
this sort of stuff. And not only that, but using
the same technology, the same procedure of having a magnet
implanted in your finger, you can pair that with other

(43:40):
devices that are able to detect completely different types of
UH data and and feel it. So, for example, let's
say you've got a sensor that can pick up UM.
I don't know let's say infrared. It's a sensor that
can pick up infrared and it has a threshold, so

(44:02):
anything over a certain amount that sensor generates enough electricity
to activate an electro magnet. You also happen to have
one of these magnets in your finger, so you're pairing
this external device with the magnet in your finger. You
move the external device around and whenever it detects heat
that is above that threshold, it sends that signal and

(44:24):
you feel it, so you now know if something is
hot even if you're not close to it. Or another
example would be echolocation, where it sends out an ultrasonic signal,
it comes back and as you get closer and closer
to an object, that sends pulses to an electro magnet,
which again trigger the magnet that's in your fingers, so
you can actually feel when you get closer to something

(44:45):
without seeing it. So I've seen demonstrations of this where
a person is sitting down at a table, they have
a blindfold on, they've got one of these little devices,
and they've got the magnet in their finger, and someone
puts something down in front of them, like a box
of cereal, and the and they're told that there is
something on this table in front of you. You have

(45:06):
to detect where it is without reaching out and trying
to just grow up around. And so they would use
this little ultrasonic echolocation device and point it and when
they would hit where the cereal box was, it's, oh,
it's right there, because I can feel it. I can
feel the you know, from the sensor. So it's kind
of a two step process here, right. But I've seen
it paired with a lot of different ways, And in fact,

(45:28):
a lot of bio hackers say that the the ability
to detect a magnetic field or an electric field is
just that's just the tip of the iceberg if you
pair it with these other technologies. Yeah, so one of
the number one I think this is really cool in theory. Again,
not endorsing the self surgery thing, yeah, but the idea
of expanding your senses is really cool. The second thing, though,

(45:51):
is it is interesting that what you're doing here is
you're sort of repurposing part of one sense or a
combination and of senses to give you new data. So
you're still expanding your ability to build a mental picture
of the outside world. But what you're doing is giving
yourself an implant that uses your innate probably a combination

(46:14):
of your sense of touch and your appropriate reception, your
sense of where your finger is, and your feeling of
movement within it to send that data to your brain.
So it's a cognitive adaptation. You're using your thoughts. You're
not adding You're not adding some brand new type of
sensor that has to form a brand new kind of
neural relationship with your brain for this to happen. What

(46:37):
you're doing is you're just interpreting a new set of
touch stimuli and you're applying that to a different, you know,
a different experience. But it's not like you had to
invent something new, like you had to figure out, oh, well,
now I've got to figure out how my brain interprets magnets.
It's not because it's not magnets. It's the sense of
that sense of pressure. Yeah, we're going to talk about

(46:58):
a few more, and this will actually apply to pretty
much all of them, I guess all of them. They're
all talking about repurposing part of one sense to create
new ways of modeling reality. They're not talking about creating
a new sense that didn't exist before. Because Frankly, we
just don't know enough about the brain to do that,
and in most cases we don't understand enough about how

(47:19):
we actually input that data in the first place. Oh yeah, yeah,
So let's talk about another one, another potential sense. What
about electro reception? Could you have electro reception like a shark?
And I want to go ahead and say I don't
really think so. That one's not so much on the radar,
mainly because you don't want to live in the ocean, right,

(47:42):
whole episode about living under the ocean. Yeah, but that
was living in capsules. You you don't want to live
in the water. I would get really pruny, fair play,
fair play. That would be pruny, prunny landscape of badness,
all right, escape of badness? All right? Well, anyway, so
the sharks and other elector receptive animals live in water,
and the air doesn't conduct electrical currents like seawater does

(48:05):
the way we talked about. So do no land animals
have this sense? I found evidence of one one land
dwelling animal that uses electro reception. That's the Australian echidna
orchidna kidna. Yeah, it's sort of sort of like a platypus,
And here's how it works. It digs around in the
wet top soil with its beak, which has electro receptors

(48:27):
that detect the squigglings of earthworms somewhere down in that
moist soil. Does that sound like a power up you want?
I think? Uh? I think I could write an entire
series about a superhero whose only power with the detection
of earthworms, to root around in the ground with its nose.
That's all he can do. It would be about as
good as aqua man. Yeah, yeah, the lateral move. Okay, okay.

(48:51):
What about infrared sensing? I think this is a really
cool one, and it's actually tied into some research that's
good for other reasons. So we already talked about the
natural infrared sensing of snakes, but it is possible to
teach your brain to interpret infrared signals with the help
of technology. So in researchers led by Duke University neurobiologist

(49:14):
Miguel Nikolaylis published findings on a study that used a
neural implant to bring infrared vision to mice, or maybe
not vision, I don't know. It's probably something more like
long range infrared touch yeah, and so the way it
worked was the Duke scientists created an electronic infrared sensor,
so that's just a standard mechanical infrared sensor external to

(49:39):
the mouse's brain. It mounts on the forehead. Then they
wired the device directly to the mouse's brain so the
device can send electrical impulses down into the somato sensory cortex,
which is the part of the mouse's brain that interprets
tactile information like touch. Specifically, they said it was to

(49:59):
the part that comes from the touch on the mouse's whiskers.
So let's try it out. You you put a mouse
in a contraption like this with its brain all wired up,
and you put it in a test chamber with multiple ports,
say ports A through D, and each one of these
ports has the capability to light up with an infrared light,

(50:20):
which is normally invisible to mice. It's invisible told mammals. Now,
when the infrared light comes on into port, that port
offers a sip of water as a reward if the
mouse runs to that port. After a period of training,
the mice were able to use the neural implant to
quickly detect and find rewards based on infrared light that's

(50:40):
invisible to their eyes, and that's pretty cool directly to
the brain. So one interesting observation was that before the
mice were trained, they reacted to the data coming from
the implant by scratching at their faces like they were itching.
So they interpret it literally as a physical sensation, something

(51:01):
like a tickle on the face. Oh wow, because it
was wired to that same part of their brain. So
so they were like, I see this thing and it's
making my face it yeah. And the people who who
authored this study emphasized how this isn't limited just to infrared, say,
or to this kind of part of the brain. It's
generally a proof that hey, we could expand this. We

(51:23):
could use technology to sense things and then send that
data directly to the brain so you wouldn't have to
rout it through some other part of the body or sense.
And another one of the things about it is that
they showed how you can hijack part of the brain
two So in this case, the part of the brain

(51:44):
that detects touch to detect a new type of data
without destroying that part of the brain's natural ability. So
the mice still had an intact sense of touch. It
wasn't the case. They could still run around and detect
where they were, you know, winds based on their whiskers,
or if they were brushing against something that that was
still fine. Sure, yeah, you could. You could partially hijack

(52:05):
this sense without destroying its natural capabilities. So what's interesting
to me is that we talked about in nature how
birds see magnetic fields, or at least that's what that's
the that's the prevailing theory, prevailing prevailing theory that they're
seeing magnetic fields. And now we've got mice feeling infrared,
and I would have put those, Uh, I would have

(52:27):
switched those just just based upon like if I were again,
if you weren't giving me all this information and you
just told me, how do you how do you think
they perceived this? Like was? It was the most analogous
too for people. I would have gone with vision for
infrared and feeling for magnetic fields. I wonder why they
why they chose specifically the whisker touchy, Yeah, I'd suspect

(52:54):
it had to do with the part that they the
part of the brain that they understood the best. Probably
if you were to put in, say the visual cortex,
it might be that the mice just start hallucinating like crazy.
You just have a mouse just tripping out, and that's
that's not a very useful mouse. That's just pinky in
the brain. Yeah, speaking of tripping, what about human echolocation

(53:15):
using some sort of electronic device. Oh yeah, we mentioned
that earlier. Well, that's real. People have created this. Let's
talk about Spider Man. What is Spider Man's spidy sense.
How does it work? Well? Magic? But no, no, no,
I'm not asking the mechanism. What's what's it do? It
detects danger? Yeah, So, when when something is about to

(53:36):
hit Spider Man upside the head, he gets a little
early warning which allows him to use his amazing boosted
reflexes to dodge all the way before said things smacks
him upside the head. Right, So, when he's in the
movie theater talking through the movie and people behind him
start throwing soda bottles and stuff like that at him,
he knows it's coming before you can tell from the
little squiggly lines that come out from his head. That's

(53:57):
the spidy sense. Yes, yeah, the exact mechanical causation of
the Spider senses, I believe unknown in the Spider Verse
spider spider man verse. It's not magic, it's science. The
spader verse, the web slinging is science, spider science. But
you might be able to simulate this with sound based

(54:17):
at echolocation, or probably with with light based echolocation, also
with like radar or something, but the specific example I
want to talk about here is sound based. So a
computer science grad student named Victor Mativitsi created a project
called the Spider Sense Suit last year, and here's how
it works. All over your body, so your legs, chest, back, arms,

(54:40):
You've got little suit nodes connected by wires, and at
each of these nodes are ultrasound microphones. They send out
ultrasonic signals and then listen for them to bounce back
at a distance of up to seventeen feet as an
object comes closer. Tiny robotic arms at the nodes facing
the object apply pressure to the skin, letting you know

(55:00):
that you're near a solid piece of matter. So with
the system like this, you could navigate hallways with your
eyes closed or since people approaching you silently from behind.
And apparently the creators used it to throw cardboard shuriken
at attackers while blindfolded. So you can become a cardboard ninja.
Uh you know, I love this idea. And you know,
we call this haptic feedback. This idea that when you

(55:22):
have some sort of sensory input and then you get
this tactile output. Uh So video games use this all
the time, like you just rumble controllers and a simple example,
but there are a lot of other ones. I've seen
things like um chest plates and helmets that vibrate so
that every time you're shot you get a little zap
or or sometimes it's a bit of an impact, a thud.

(55:43):
But in this case, it's one that's responding not to
a an action within a video game, but rather getting
closer to some sort of object because the ultrasonic signal
has gone out, bounced back and indicated how far away
that thing is and whether or not it's approaching or
moving further away. Again, the Doppler effect comes into play there.
And but but but ultrasonic waves are really quite precise. Yeah. Yeah,

(56:06):
so you can be measured really quite precisely, and in fact,
and in fact, since there's so many nodes to that
also that helps with the precision because you have presumably
they're all sending out these signals and the time that
it starts coming back. It can actually be pretty precise
on the direction of the oncoming object, the person, or whatever.
I guess. I guess we couldn't comment on exactly how

(56:28):
precise this thing is because we haven't used it, but
obviously it was it was precise enough that it was
useful in these demonstrations. Yeah, it's pretty cool idea. I
like the potential applications for it. Even if it never
goes beyond say a curiosity, it's still pretty cool. Although
you could see quote unquote, you could see potential applications

(56:48):
that would be pretty useful. So yeah, I mean, our
senses are pretty amazing. The more we learn about them,
the more phenomenal they seem. Even even though it's kind
of mundane because it's the stuff we live with day
in and day out. What we are able to accomplish
is pretty incredible when you think of all the chemicals
were detecting, all the light we're able to interpret. But

(57:09):
that doesn't mean that we have to be satisfied with them.
So I I do think that it's going to be
pretty cool. We're going to find more and more ways
in the future to create ways to augment these senses.
Either to make them uh like our vision more even
more keen, or perhaps being able to detect further outside
the visit what's normally considered the visible spectrum. Maybe will
be redefining what is detectable by human means in another

(57:33):
decade or two. Who knows. I think one cool thing
about this might apply to theoretical astrobiology, because if you're
talking about the ways that we can expand human senses,
you might also be coming up with cool ideas for
how aliens might create models of the world. There's no
reason to expect that they would use the same kind

(57:55):
of sense as we do to create physical models of reality, right, Yeah,
they might have an entirely different way of sensing their
environments and interacting with them and and uh deriving meaning
from things, which presents itself with lots of different scenarios,
many of which I'm sure we will explore in science
fiction down the road. Because the mind boggles, really, I mean,

(58:15):
you could have an alien race that has a completely
different construction of of what reality is based upon the
the kinds of data that it can receive and interpret.
It could be just as accurate and useful to them
as ours is to us. It would just be alien,
which is kind of cool. Well, anyway, that wraps up
this discussion. If you guys out there have any suggestions

(58:36):
for topics we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking,
you should let us know. You can send us an email.
The address is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or
drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.
The handle at all three locations is FW thinking and
we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on

(58:59):
this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking
dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,