January 14, 2026 • 33 mins
Can we hear echoes like bats, or see x-rays like Superman? Believe it or not, scientists think the answer is yes. Jorge talks to three experts involved in extending human senses.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, if you can use stereo headphones to listen to
this episode. Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of
iHeartRadio More Hit Cham And today we're tackling the question
do super senses exist? Scientists out there have an idea
that we can give humans new senses beyond the ones
(00:20):
we already have, and this is done by basically hacking
your brain. We're going to be talking to experts about echolocation,
a skill some people have to use sonar Like that, dude,
how we're going to talk to a scientist that's using
technology to one day let us sense things you can't
see or hear, like collectromagnetic fields or even Wi Fi.
(00:46):
So you get ready to augment your awareness as we
make sense of the question do super senses exist? Hey,
Today we're starting our exploration of the limits of our
senses by taking a dive into echolocation. This is something
(01:08):
that some animals like bats, dolphins, some shrews, and digny
dormice do where they use sound to know what's around them.
Now you might have heard that some people can do
it too. To fill us in on everything we know
about echolocation in humans, I reached out to two of
the world's experts on the subject, Professors Laura Thaller and
(01:32):
Liam Norman of Durham University in the UK.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
My name is Liam Norman, and a lot of my
research concerns human perception, in particular human echolocation.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I investigate echolocation, in particular how people echolocate and how
they use echolocation to perceive their Welsh and how they
learn it amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Maybe can you start us off by explaining what is echolocation.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Echolocation is the process where typically an animal make a sound,
That sound goes out in the environment, and then when
there's something in the sounds past, it will reflect the
sound and so that's the echo that then comes back
to the person and they can hear that echo, and
this carries spatial information.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
But what's around them? Yes, can you give some examples
of humans that are able to do this?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So one of the possibly most famous non echo locators
Daniel Kish, he is blind from an early age. He's American,
and he has used echo location as long as he
can remember, and he uses mouth clicks as his sound
that he makes. So they're very brief, trendient sound there
like this, and these sounds then travel out in the
(02:44):
environment and the echoes return to him the reflections of
the sound. It doesn't mean that he clicks all the time,
you know, the ouphent situations where he doesn't need to.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So why do you think this person, Daniel Kish is
so famous?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Now, Daniel Kish is very good at echo location. We
have tested his skills and variety experiment and so we
found that he's extremely good at localizing how fartings are
weigh and whether they are to the left or right,
So he can, for example, determine a shift in the
distance of about centimeter.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Here we're talking about Daniel Kish, one of the most
well known human echolocators. If you google his name you
can find lots of videos of him using echolocation. Mister
Kish is so good at it. If you place an object,
say five ft in front of him, he can tell
if you move that object half an inch closer or
half an inch back, and he can tell if you
(03:39):
move it a few inches to the right or to
the left. He can also tell what shape an object is.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
So it was a bit of a silly experiment, but
we just wanted to test possible So we had different
shapes that were made from cardboards and there were either
a triangle or a circuleancequere and wrecked angle and represented
one at a time, and he was allowed to click
at them as long as he wanted and to move
his head, and she could tell them a part very easily.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Actually, mister Kish is also able to recognize the texture
of an object, whether it's rough or smooth, and he
can tell if something is hollow or flat, can tell
their size, whether they're up or down, and all of
it while being completely blind. It's really quite amazing. But
(04:28):
here's the surprising fact. Daniel Kish is not unique. There
are many expert echo locators out there like him, and
actually doctor Steller and Norman think that anyone can learn
to echo locate. Okay, so who can do human echo location?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That's a good question. The short answer is, anybody who
has an ability to use hearing normally to locate sounds
should be able to learn echo location to some degree.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
So one thing that we've learned is that anyone can
learn to echolocate people with pickle vision, people who are blind. Obviously,
it is mediated through hearing, so if there's a profound
hearing loss, then there are natural limits to how this
can work. But in principle. It's very learnable and we
had in workshops at the youngest child that's learned it
(05:18):
was three years old, and in our research, which today
has focused on adults, the oldest person was seventy nine
years old.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yes, people from three years old to seventy nine years
old can learn to echo locate. You don't need to
be blind or have special hearing to do it, although
it helps you have been doing it for a while.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
As with anything, there is a benefit to learning this
ability from a young age. So the best human echolocate
is that we know began learning this ability either in
early or middle childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Wow. How do you train someone to echo locate?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
For our research, we have developed a paradigm where we
have different tasks that we ask people to do.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Okay, here's how you can train to echo locate. The
first thing you have to do is learn to make
the clicking sound with your mouth.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
And so this is usually made by placing the tongue
in a particular position at the roof of the mouth
and then keeping the mouth open. You then bring the
tone down quite quickly and it can create a kind
of a short popping sound or a clicking sound. It
sounds like a.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Now you don't have to make this particular sound. Some
echo locators use shouts or hissing or whistling. You can
also use a clicker in your hand. But mouth clicks
are good because they're short so they don't interfere with
the echo. They're sharp, so they have lots of high
frequencies which give you more resolution, and they come from
your mouth, which is a fixed distance from your ears,
(06:47):
so it's more consistent.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
And then once you've established that the person is comfortable
making a mouth click, then it's just about teaching them
what to listen for in the echoes. And the key
thing is to start with tasks that are fairly simple
and then just develop the difficulty in a step by
step way. For example, you can place a large object
in front of the person. They can be very close
(07:09):
to the head, and then you ask them to make
a click, and then you can take the object away.
They do the same thing again, and you ask them
to pay attention to the difference in how those two
sounds sound, and then you ask them to judge whether
they think the object is in front of them or
(07:32):
whether it's not there, and you can gradually increase the distance,
and so with practice they should be able to develop
disability and be able to do these tasks that maybe
one or two meet a distance after a few weeks.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
And this training works. Even people who don't have a
visual impairment can learn to have sonar like a bat.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
And you'd be surprised. It sounds difficult. But then we
have people who at first are very doubtful, like oh, no,
I cannot dose this as sort of ago, and then
they come in for the second or third session and
they just get the hang of it. And then we
asked them to come in for twenty sessions in total,
and we space this around ten weeks out and by
the end when we benchmark them to someone who's done
this for ten years or more, many of the people
(08:15):
who've trained for just ten weeks reached the level of
this expert, which suggests, you know, it's a skill that
you don't have to practice for ten years. So for
some people they are very good even earlier on, so
may not even take ten weeks.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yes, it seems anyone can learn to echo locate. Even
you could learn to do it, you just have to
want to learn. In fact, the two researchers we're talking
to who are both sided taught themselves to echo locate.
So you're able to echo locate, you've taught yourself to
do it.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, I have had a good role model. I'm not
as good as many of the echo locations, but I'm
not too bad. I can do some you know, basic stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Okay, But here's the thing about echo location principle. It's
easy to know what's going on. You make a sound,
the sound goes out, it bounces on things, it comes
back to your ears, and from the echo you can
tell what's there. But if you talk to anyone who
can echo locate, they're not really thinking about any of
the physics or even the timing between the sound and
(09:19):
the bouncing echo. It's really more of a feeling. Was
there a moment when it clicked for you? No pun
intended when you say that, like, Okay, I get it now,
I understand what to listen for.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, definitely. I started out expecting or I must have
this revelation of this this echo that I'm hearing, but
often that's not what it sounds like. There's something's presented
at one two meters. Also, for me, it's more the
quality that I'm paying attention to and so that was
an ahab moment for me.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I see, it's not so much about hearing the echo,
but maybe kind of feeling the echo.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
In other words, unless you're sh across the Grand Canyon, Hello, Hello,
in a room with objects close to you, the echoes
happen way too fast for us to consciously notice them,
which means that when you echo locate, your brain is
sort of processing the echo automatically, and to your conscious self,
(10:19):
it's just the feeling that you.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Get it's close.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Or to the right or left, or that it's round
or rough or smooth. And that means that either your
brain is already wired to do echolocation, or your brain
rewires itself as you learn to do it. So when
we come back, we're going to find out which is
the case by digging into what happens in the brain
(10:45):
of people who echo locate, and we're going to find
out what that means for our ability to hack the
brain to gain more supersensus. Stay with us, we'll be
right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about whether supersensues exist,
(11:13):
and we started with e colocation. It's what bats and
dolphins use to get around and it's something people can
learn to do. In fact, they can learn to do
it pretty well, to the point where they can notice
centimeter changes in the position of things around them and
even their shape and texture. Now, I asked our two experts,
(11:34):
professors Laura Thaler and Lean Norman, to describe what happens
in the brain when people echo locate, and their answer
is kind of surprising. Okay, so I saw some research
done by you about what happens to the brain of
people who learn to echolocate. Can you tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, I think this is one of the most fascinating
things about this topic. Who don't have all the answers yet.
But first of all, that location is obviously processed through
the auditory system because it is part of our hearing.
But when we conduct brain imaging studies and we have
expert eclocators in an MRIs Kunner and they listen to
e colocation sounds they make judgments about them, we find
that actually it's the part of the brain that we
(12:15):
normally call the visual codex that is the most active.
That's where we see by far the most activity in
the brain in terms of processing these zones. So that's
quite surprising because we call this visual codex.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Okay, this is the first interesting fact about the brain
activity of people who use echolocation, and that is that
they're part of the brain that scientists normally think is
used to see things. The visual cortex lights up when
they echo locate, and this is unexpected because A you
see this in expert echo locators who are blind, so
(12:51):
they're definitely not using their eyes and b echolocation only
uses hearing. So why is the visual cortex being you
and not only that, Scientists can see these brain areas
light up in the same way as if the person
was seeing something in front of them.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
When we followed this up later on, wondering is there
a systematic pattern to this activity, we found that it's
not just responding to the echos, but that there's a
relationship between the location and space where the echo comes
from and the part of the brain in this eartivisual
context that maps that takeos sound and let's often retract
(13:32):
to as retino topek mapping.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
All right, this is a little complicated but super interesting.
If you're a sighted person, there's kind of a one
to one mapping between what you see and which part
of the visual area of your brain lights up. This
is the little patch of brain that first gets the
signals from your eyes. So, for example, if you see
an image of a black cross on a white background
(13:58):
and then someone looked at your brain actively in that area,
they'll see it activate in a little cross pattern as
if someone was projecting that image onto that part of
the brain. And if you see a circle in front
of you, you'll see that area light up in a circle.
It's super fascinating. But what's amazing is that the scientists
(14:19):
saw the same thing happen for echoes. In expert echolocators
who are blind, if they send an object to one
side of them, then one side of their visual cortex
would light up, and if they sense an object on
the other side, the other side of the visual cortex
would light up. They were using their visual cortex almost
(14:39):
in the same way a sided person would, and this
points to something that scientists call sensory plasticity.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
So it seems like there are parts in the brand
that have a high degree of what we call plasticity,
which is the capability to change and adapt over time
to process information from sensory modolities that they ordinarily would process.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
In other words, the wiring of your brain for your
senses isn't fixed. If your brain notices, for example, that
you're not using your visual area because maybe you're blind,
your brain will start using that area for other senses.
In this case, the visual area is used to process
what the echo locators are getting through their ears when
(15:26):
they send out these sounds and then hear the echoes.
And not only that, Doctor Thaler and Norman think your
brain actually starts to change. Is there evidence though, that
people who echolocate for a long time somehow the brain changes.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yes, and there is some evidence to suggest that is
the case. So somebody who who is initially naive to
this ability but then learns it over maybe a ten
week period, we find subtle changes in order for your
brain areas where there might be high gradmouta density in
that area. But at the same time we also get
these functional changes in visual codex where the role of
the brain reagion has changed to some extent.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
So when learning to echolocate, your brain possibly grows the
hearing parts of your brain and it starts using the
seeing parts of your brain for processing the information you hear.
In other words, your brain to some degree molds itself
to this new sense so that it becomes a natural
addition to your existing senses. And this says something profound
(16:30):
about the brain. Well, what do you think this says
about just human senses and human abilities how our brain works.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I think it says a couple of things. I think
it tells us that our sensory abilities are much more
adaptable than what we previously believed. So the classic textbook
idea is that where you have the visual codex that
processes site, you have the order free codex that processes
hearing and so on. But research seem to suggest that
these brain readers are much more adaptable and they can
(17:00):
process sensory information from an atypical modality. And so what
we would call the visual codex isn't necessarily the visual
codex In many people, people who are blind, they can
use as part of the brainfall many other purposes that
aren't supported through vision.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
It just creates, like, for me, I think this feeling
of yeah, we do have a sensory repertoire that we're
born with that we use every day, but we can
actually do a lot more. It just makes you sort
of believe in, you know, other possibilities. If you think
about technology that might make you able to sense the
mood in a room or favorite example. Also you know,
(17:38):
sense magnetic lords or something like that. You know where
if you have technology to provide you this information and
you know, we should be able to do it. So
I think that's what e location has certainly made me
very confident with that we can expand sensory reportoire.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Wait, did you just say that we could expand our
senses so we can sense magnetism using technolology and our
brain can adapt to that well. As it happens, I
talked to a scientists working on just this idea. So
when we come back, we're going to see how technology
can hack your brain to give you extra senses like
(18:14):
sensing magnetic fields or even Wi Fi. Stay with us,
we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about
(18:35):
whether supersensus exist. Now, this last segment is going to
seem a little bit like science fiction. For example, imagine
a scenario where you're a chef or a cook and
you work in a commercial kitchen.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
And somehow you can tell how hot something.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Is just by looking at it. You wouldn't have to
touch it or get near it to tell. You would
just no, you could tell if a pan was the
right temperature, or if a piece of steak was hot enough.
Or imagine, if you could sense the Earth's magnetic field,
you could have a perfect sense of direction. You would
always know where north was, no matter how deep in
(19:13):
a forest you were, or if you were inside a
building or a crowded city you've never been to. Having
these kinds of supersensus may seem like science fiction, but
I promise it's not. It's real science, at least according
to the next expert I talked to, doctor Amber Mymon.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
So my name is Amber Myimon. I'm a researcher at
the interface of neuroscience and human computer interaction. Most of
my research has to do with how we can use
technologies to induce neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Now, I always thought that humans had five senses, but
the first thing I learned from doctor Mymon is that
apparently we have more than five senses.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
So we basically inherited the five senses from philosophers many, many,
many decades ago, such as Aristotle, who said that we
have five basic senses. We have vision, hearing, touch, tastes,
and smell, which people are usually familiar with.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
But we don't have five senses.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
So that's the thing. It's an issue of hot debate.
Right now, I can give you an example. We have
something called approprioceptive sense, which is kind of a sense
of where our body parts are located. So I can
know where my hand is located, for example, even if
I don't see my hand. And then we also have
vestibular system, which controls our sense of balance and more
(20:41):
and more.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yes, scientists can't really agree how many senses we have.
Some people say our ability to sense temperature, or to
feel or heart beat or are breathing, or our sense
of balance, or even our ability to feel pain should
also be included in our list of senses. A sense,
it seems, includes any time we know something about the world,
(21:04):
including our bodies, without thinking about it. It's when we
just know information about the world. Okay, now let's get
to supersensus. Let's get to the topic of supersensus. So
there's the idea of augmenting your senses.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
Right, So the idea of augmenting our senses is generally
changing our sensory abilities in a positive way for some
form of improvement, like for example, Superman and see into
the thermal range. Is it something that I've personally worked
on and it's an interesting time.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
So a supersense is basically giving ourselves the ability to
sense something we currently can't sense, like seeing into the
infrared or having X ray vision, or being able to
sense the Earth's magnetic field. And for that you need technology.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
According to doctor Mama, there are two ways to do this.
The first is to base turn yourself into a cyborg.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
There are methods to augment our senses that are invasive
or they physically interact with our brain. So I can
give you some examples. You can have an implant, for example,
Retinal prosthesis are known as bionic eyes colloquially in day
to day's each These are implants that electrically stimulate whether
(22:28):
it's the retina today. There are also cortical implants that
stimulate the brain directly, and what they do is they
try to physically create the sensory information. They physically activate
the retina, for example, to allow blind people to have
some form of visual perception.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I guess can that be used to augment someone
without a visual impairment? Like, can I use an implant
to make me see better?
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yes, absolutely. There's also more and more awareness of this
concept of augmenting the senses, which means enhancing or extending.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
So one way to extend our senses with technology is
with neural prosthetics. In other words, implanting some device senses
something about the world and then having that device give
that information directly to your nerves or directly to our brains.
Believe it or not, that's something that's being developed right now.
(23:24):
There are retinal implants that can be attached by surgery
inside your eyeball that will then zap the nerves the
back of your eye to tell what the device sees
directly to your brain.
Speaker 5 (23:36):
You can imagine that the device could have.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
A regular camera to allow someone who's blind to see,
or you can imagine using this to give someone a
super sense. For example, you could attach a camera that
also sees infrared or X rays, or that has a
super telescoping lens or a super microscope lens, and then
the implant would zap your nerves tell your brain what
(24:01):
it sees. I could do a whole episode about this idea.
But the more interesting idea that doctor Mymo does research
on is to give someone supersensus without risky invasive eye
or brain surgery.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
But what's really fascinating is that there are also non
invasive ways that take advantage of a couple things. They
take advantage of the fact that we have connections between
our senses. They take advantage of the fact that our
brain is plastic.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Okay, remember when we talked about echolocation. Echolocation is basically
a supersense, although it still relies on sensus we already
have in this case hearing. But echolocation is important because
of two things we mentioned before. The first is that
the brain is flexible, and when you echo locate, you
actually use the parts you usually used to see, the
(24:54):
visual parts of your brain to process what you hear.
Scientists call this cross modal correspondence, which is when your
brain activates connections between the different senses. This is most
noticeable in people with something called synesthesia, which is when,
for example, some people say they can hear colors or
(25:15):
smell sounds.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
So, for example, if you're familiar with Billie Eilish, the singer,
or for El Williams, they have reported that when they
associate automatically, they correlate different sounds and colors, and this
affects their artistic abilities. It affects their music and their
music making abilities. And another example is the painter Kandinski.
(25:40):
He also correlated between colors and sounds but also shapes,
and this very much affected his artwork.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Now, some people have a lot of synesthesia, like the
artist doctor Maima just mentioned, but all of us have
to some degree some cross wiring between our senses. For example,
if I asked you to think of a shape and
I said the word guba again, gouba, most of you
probably thought of something round and maybe big. But now
(26:11):
if I ask you to think of another shape and
I said the word tikiki, you probably thought of something
thin or sharp or something with edges. Doctor Maiman says,
our brains are sort of wired to have associations like that,
and that can be used to give you supersensus. Well,
I'm not eager to implant a chip in my eye
(26:33):
or my brain. So this idea that maybe we can
augment my senses just by kind of taking advantage of
these connections between the census, it's super interesting. Tell us
about that idea.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
We have the concept of novel senses, which we can
call supersensus, which is basically taking information in the world
that's not censor information such as air quality, pollution, or
even Wi Fi information that's out there in the world,
and conveying it to people in a sensory way. So,
(27:03):
for example, I can convey Wi Fi information as tactile
information on my body.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Okay, here's the idea. Instead of directly connecting say an
infrared camera or compassed directly into your brain or nervous system,
you could have that device talk to your brain through
one of your other senses. So, for example, you could
wear a belt that vibrated the closer you are to
pointing to the north pole. Or you could wear an
(27:33):
infrared camera that played a special sound for you whenever
you were looking at something hot, or you could wear
glasses that turn pink the closer you are to a
Wi Fi signal. And at first you might find this
kind of annoying, or you'd be very self conscious about
these vibrations or sounds or colors. But after a while,
(27:53):
doctor Maima says, because of your brain's plasticity, you'll just
get used to it and it just becomes another one
of your senses. Okay, this will make more sense with
an example, So Let's say you wanted to give a
chef or a cook the ability to see into the
infrared or to tell how hot or cold something is
(28:14):
just by looking at it. So how does this technology work.
There's a camera, right, and the camera is recording the temperature,
and you're conveying that temperature to the person via sound.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Exactly, that's precisely what we're doing. We're taking the thermal
information acquired through the thermal camera and through an algorithm
and six stages of mapping that I won't get into,
and we divided it into hot, cold, and neutral.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Okay, So imagine the chef is wearing a camera and
whenever they look at something hot or cold or room temperature,
they hear a different sound. For example, whenever the infrared
camera sees something it knows is hot, it would play
this sound. When the chef faces something the camera knows
is cold, you would play this sound. And that's enough
(29:04):
to give you a super sense.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
And this was very intuitive. People with fifteen minutes of
training could learn to identify thermal information hot and cold
information that is invisible to them through their sense of vision.
For example, they could recognize a cold item in a
bag that they couldn't.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
See, now, what's cool is that. In doctor Memo's experiment,
the sound they played also told the person a little
about where the hot or cold object was by changing
the pitch of the sound.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
We didn't want them to only perceive the hot and cold.
We also wanted them to know where something hot and
where something cold is. We played back to them the
auditory information using pitch manipulation. If a hot item was
located higher up, it would have the hot sound, but
(30:06):
also it would have a higher pitched sound, and people
could learn to understand this very quickly, could learn to
perceive this form of information very quickly.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
So, for example, if the chef in the kitchen was
facing four pots on a stove, the computer would play
a specific sound to them, and they would instantly and
intuitively just know which of the four pots was hot
and which was coal.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
And finally, we tested them. We tested them both on
their ability to locate objects through sound, and we tested
them on their ability to recognize the temperature of objects
through sound. And ultimately they got up to something like
eighty seven percent abilities for recognizing thermal information that's invisible
(30:56):
to their eyes.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
And so you're cooking, you're cooking, and I'm training this.
So now when I see a pen, there's a sound
plane in my ear, but I'm not thinking about the sound,
but I know somehow that how hot that pen is?
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Wow, that's super cool, so.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
Intuitive to the extent that over time you don't even
hear it as sounds. You perceive it as thermal information.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
And so suddenly you have the kind of the superpowers
of a snake or superman.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Absolutely, we want to give these chefs superman abilities.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, oh wow, Well, chess are superheroes already.
Speaker 5 (31:33):
Chefs are superheroes, at least the good ones. All right.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think the big takeaway of this episode is that
supersensus are possible.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
It's within our power to teach.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Ourselves new ways to sense the world, like an echo location,
and it's within current technology to give us census we
didn't think we're possible, like sensing magnetic fields or sensing.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
Temperature from afar.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Need to be firm krypton or get bitten by a
radioactive spider, or even have something implanted in you, you
can use the power of the brain's ability to adapt
to gain or sensus. Now you might be thinking, where
does this end? What will this do to humans? That
was the last question I asked doctor Maimund. Well, maybe
(32:21):
just to wrap it up, what do you think it
would do to us as people? As humans if we
have supersensus, Like let's say suddenly I'm walking around and
I'm aware of the temperature of things, and I'm aware
of how strong the WiFi is, and I'm aware of
the air quality, all of this at the same time,
what do you think it's going to do to us?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
So ultimately, at the very simplest level, it will increase
our performance abilities, right, It'll maximize what we can do
in this world. It's really getting people to maximize their
potential and stretch their brain to its life limits and
find out what we can do that we don't currently do.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
All Right, I hope that all made sense and maybe
even super sense. Thanks for joining us. See you next
time you've been listening to science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio
written and produced by me or Hey Cham, edited by
Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and
(33:30):
mixer k cy peprom And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign
stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, if you can use stereo headphones to listen to
this episode. Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of
iHeartRadio More Hit Cham And today we're tackling the question
do super senses exist? Scientists out there have an idea
that we can give humans new senses beyond the ones
(00:20):
we already have, and this is done by basically hacking
your brain. We're going to be talking to experts about echolocation,
a skill some people have to use sonar Like that, dude,
how we're going to talk to a scientist that's using
technology to one day let us sense things you can't
see or hear, like collectromagnetic fields or even Wi Fi.
(00:46):
So you get ready to augment your awareness as we
make sense of the question do super senses exist? Hey,
Today we're starting our exploration of the limits of our
senses by taking a dive into echolocation. This is something
(01:08):
that some animals like bats, dolphins, some shrews, and digny
dormice do where they use sound to know what's around them.
Now you might have heard that some people can do
it too. To fill us in on everything we know
about echolocation in humans, I reached out to two of
the world's experts on the subject, Professors Laura Thaller and
(01:32):
Liam Norman of Durham University in the UK.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
My name is Liam Norman, and a lot of my
research concerns human perception, in particular human echolocation.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I investigate echolocation, in particular how people echolocate and how
they use echolocation to perceive their Welsh and how they
learn it amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Maybe can you start us off by explaining what is echolocation.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Echolocation is the process where typically an animal make a sound,
That sound goes out in the environment, and then when
there's something in the sounds past, it will reflect the
sound and so that's the echo that then comes back
to the person and they can hear that echo, and
this carries spatial information.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
But what's around them? Yes, can you give some examples
of humans that are able to do this?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So one of the possibly most famous non echo locators
Daniel Kish, he is blind from an early age. He's American,
and he has used echo location as long as he
can remember, and he uses mouth clicks as his sound
that he makes. So they're very brief, trendient sound there
like this, and these sounds then travel out in the
(02:44):
environment and the echoes return to him the reflections of
the sound. It doesn't mean that he clicks all the time,
you know, the ouphent situations where he doesn't need to.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So why do you think this person, Daniel Kish is
so famous?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Now, Daniel Kish is very good at echo location. We
have tested his skills and variety experiment and so we
found that he's extremely good at localizing how fartings are
weigh and whether they are to the left or right,
So he can, for example, determine a shift in the
distance of about centimeter.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Here we're talking about Daniel Kish, one of the most
well known human echolocators. If you google his name you
can find lots of videos of him using echolocation. Mister
Kish is so good at it. If you place an object,
say five ft in front of him, he can tell
if you move that object half an inch closer or
half an inch back, and he can tell if you
(03:39):
move it a few inches to the right or to
the left. He can also tell what shape an object is.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
So it was a bit of a silly experiment, but
we just wanted to test possible So we had different
shapes that were made from cardboards and there were either
a triangle or a circuleancequere and wrecked angle and represented
one at a time, and he was allowed to click
at them as long as he wanted and to move
his head, and she could tell them a part very easily.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Actually, mister Kish is also able to recognize the texture
of an object, whether it's rough or smooth, and he
can tell if something is hollow or flat, can tell
their size, whether they're up or down, and all of
it while being completely blind. It's really quite amazing. But
(04:28):
here's the surprising fact. Daniel Kish is not unique. There
are many expert echo locators out there like him, and
actually doctor Steller and Norman think that anyone can learn
to echo locate. Okay, so who can do human echo location?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That's a good question. The short answer is, anybody who
has an ability to use hearing normally to locate sounds
should be able to learn echo location to some degree.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
So one thing that we've learned is that anyone can
learn to echolocate people with pickle vision, people who are blind. Obviously,
it is mediated through hearing, so if there's a profound
hearing loss, then there are natural limits to how this
can work. But in principle. It's very learnable and we
had in workshops at the youngest child that's learned it
(05:18):
was three years old, and in our research, which today
has focused on adults, the oldest person was seventy nine
years old.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yes, people from three years old to seventy nine years
old can learn to echo locate. You don't need to
be blind or have special hearing to do it, although
it helps you have been doing it for a while.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
As with anything, there is a benefit to learning this
ability from a young age. So the best human echolocate
is that we know began learning this ability either in
early or middle childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Wow. How do you train someone to echo locate?
Speaker 3 (05:54):
For our research, we have developed a paradigm where we
have different tasks that we ask people to do.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Okay, here's how you can train to echo locate. The
first thing you have to do is learn to make
the clicking sound with your mouth.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
And so this is usually made by placing the tongue
in a particular position at the roof of the mouth
and then keeping the mouth open. You then bring the
tone down quite quickly and it can create a kind
of a short popping sound or a clicking sound. It
sounds like a.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Now you don't have to make this particular sound. Some
echo locators use shouts or hissing or whistling. You can
also use a clicker in your hand. But mouth clicks
are good because they're short so they don't interfere with
the echo. They're sharp, so they have lots of high
frequencies which give you more resolution, and they come from
your mouth, which is a fixed distance from your ears,
(06:47):
so it's more consistent.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
And then once you've established that the person is comfortable
making a mouth click, then it's just about teaching them
what to listen for in the echoes. And the key
thing is to start with tasks that are fairly simple
and then just develop the difficulty in a step by
step way. For example, you can place a large object
in front of the person. They can be very close
(07:09):
to the head, and then you ask them to make
a click, and then you can take the object away.
They do the same thing again, and you ask them
to pay attention to the difference in how those two
sounds sound, and then you ask them to judge whether
they think the object is in front of them or
(07:32):
whether it's not there, and you can gradually increase the distance,
and so with practice they should be able to develop
disability and be able to do these tasks that maybe
one or two meet a distance after a few weeks.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
And this training works. Even people who don't have a
visual impairment can learn to have sonar like a bat.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
And you'd be surprised. It sounds difficult. But then we
have people who at first are very doubtful, like oh, no,
I cannot dose this as sort of ago, and then
they come in for the second or third session and
they just get the hang of it. And then we
asked them to come in for twenty sessions in total,
and we space this around ten weeks out and by
the end when we benchmark them to someone who's done
this for ten years or more, many of the people
(08:15):
who've trained for just ten weeks reached the level of
this expert, which suggests, you know, it's a skill that
you don't have to practice for ten years. So for
some people they are very good even earlier on, so
may not even take ten weeks.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yes, it seems anyone can learn to echo locate. Even
you could learn to do it, you just have to
want to learn. In fact, the two researchers we're talking
to who are both sided taught themselves to echo locate.
So you're able to echo locate, you've taught yourself to
do it.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, I have had a good role model. I'm not
as good as many of the echo locations, but I'm
not too bad. I can do some you know, basic stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Okay, But here's the thing about echo location principle. It's
easy to know what's going on. You make a sound,
the sound goes out, it bounces on things, it comes
back to your ears, and from the echo you can
tell what's there. But if you talk to anyone who
can echo locate, they're not really thinking about any of
the physics or even the timing between the sound and
(09:19):
the bouncing echo. It's really more of a feeling. Was
there a moment when it clicked for you? No pun
intended when you say that, like, Okay, I get it now,
I understand what to listen for.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, definitely. I started out expecting or I must have
this revelation of this this echo that I'm hearing, but
often that's not what it sounds like. There's something's presented
at one two meters. Also, for me, it's more the
quality that I'm paying attention to and so that was
an ahab moment for me.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I see, it's not so much about hearing the echo,
but maybe kind of feeling the echo.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
In other words, unless you're sh across the Grand Canyon, Hello, Hello,
in a room with objects close to you, the echoes
happen way too fast for us to consciously notice them,
which means that when you echo locate, your brain is
sort of processing the echo automatically, and to your conscious self,
(10:19):
it's just the feeling that you.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Get it's close.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Or to the right or left, or that it's round
or rough or smooth. And that means that either your
brain is already wired to do echolocation, or your brain
rewires itself as you learn to do it. So when
we come back, we're going to find out which is
the case by digging into what happens in the brain
(10:45):
of people who echo locate, and we're going to find
out what that means for our ability to hack the
brain to gain more supersensus. Stay with us, we'll be
right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about whether supersensues exist,
(11:13):
and we started with e colocation. It's what bats and
dolphins use to get around and it's something people can
learn to do. In fact, they can learn to do
it pretty well, to the point where they can notice
centimeter changes in the position of things around them and
even their shape and texture. Now, I asked our two experts,
(11:34):
professors Laura Thaler and Lean Norman, to describe what happens
in the brain when people echo locate, and their answer
is kind of surprising. Okay, so I saw some research
done by you about what happens to the brain of
people who learn to echolocate. Can you tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, I think this is one of the most fascinating
things about this topic. Who don't have all the answers yet.
But first of all, that location is obviously processed through
the auditory system because it is part of our hearing.
But when we conduct brain imaging studies and we have
expert eclocators in an MRIs Kunner and they listen to
e colocation sounds they make judgments about them, we find
that actually it's the part of the brain that we
(12:15):
normally call the visual codex that is the most active.
That's where we see by far the most activity in
the brain in terms of processing these zones. So that's
quite surprising because we call this visual codex.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Okay, this is the first interesting fact about the brain
activity of people who use echolocation, and that is that
they're part of the brain that scientists normally think is
used to see things. The visual cortex lights up when
they echo locate, and this is unexpected because A you
see this in expert echo locators who are blind, so
(12:51):
they're definitely not using their eyes and b echolocation only
uses hearing. So why is the visual cortex being you
and not only that, Scientists can see these brain areas
light up in the same way as if the person
was seeing something in front of them.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
When we followed this up later on, wondering is there
a systematic pattern to this activity, we found that it's
not just responding to the echos, but that there's a
relationship between the location and space where the echo comes
from and the part of the brain in this eartivisual
context that maps that takeos sound and let's often retract
(13:32):
to as retino topek mapping.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
All right, this is a little complicated but super interesting.
If you're a sighted person, there's kind of a one
to one mapping between what you see and which part
of the visual area of your brain lights up. This
is the little patch of brain that first gets the
signals from your eyes. So, for example, if you see
an image of a black cross on a white background
(13:58):
and then someone looked at your brain actively in that area,
they'll see it activate in a little cross pattern as
if someone was projecting that image onto that part of
the brain. And if you see a circle in front
of you, you'll see that area light up in a circle.
It's super fascinating. But what's amazing is that the scientists
(14:19):
saw the same thing happen for echoes. In expert echolocators
who are blind, if they send an object to one
side of them, then one side of their visual cortex
would light up, and if they sense an object on
the other side, the other side of the visual cortex
would light up. They were using their visual cortex almost
(14:39):
in the same way a sided person would, and this
points to something that scientists call sensory plasticity.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
So it seems like there are parts in the brand
that have a high degree of what we call plasticity,
which is the capability to change and adapt over time
to process information from sensory modolities that they ordinarily would process.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
In other words, the wiring of your brain for your
senses isn't fixed. If your brain notices, for example, that
you're not using your visual area because maybe you're blind,
your brain will start using that area for other senses.
In this case, the visual area is used to process
what the echo locators are getting through their ears when
(15:26):
they send out these sounds and then hear the echoes.
And not only that, Doctor Thaler and Norman think your
brain actually starts to change. Is there evidence though, that
people who echolocate for a long time somehow the brain changes.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yes, and there is some evidence to suggest that is
the case. So somebody who who is initially naive to
this ability but then learns it over maybe a ten
week period, we find subtle changes in order for your
brain areas where there might be high gradmouta density in
that area. But at the same time we also get
these functional changes in visual codex where the role of
the brain reagion has changed to some extent.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
So when learning to echolocate, your brain possibly grows the
hearing parts of your brain and it starts using the
seeing parts of your brain for processing the information you hear.
In other words, your brain to some degree molds itself
to this new sense so that it becomes a natural
addition to your existing senses. And this says something profound
(16:30):
about the brain. Well, what do you think this says
about just human senses and human abilities how our brain works.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I think it says a couple of things. I think
it tells us that our sensory abilities are much more
adaptable than what we previously believed. So the classic textbook
idea is that where you have the visual codex that
processes site, you have the order free codex that processes
hearing and so on. But research seem to suggest that
these brain readers are much more adaptable and they can
(17:00):
process sensory information from an atypical modality. And so what
we would call the visual codex isn't necessarily the visual
codex In many people, people who are blind, they can
use as part of the brainfall many other purposes that
aren't supported through vision.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
It just creates, like, for me, I think this feeling
of yeah, we do have a sensory repertoire that we're
born with that we use every day, but we can
actually do a lot more. It just makes you sort
of believe in, you know, other possibilities. If you think
about technology that might make you able to sense the
mood in a room or favorite example. Also you know,
(17:38):
sense magnetic lords or something like that. You know where
if you have technology to provide you this information and
you know, we should be able to do it. So
I think that's what e location has certainly made me
very confident with that we can expand sensory reportoire.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Wait, did you just say that we could expand our
senses so we can sense magnetism using technolology and our
brain can adapt to that well. As it happens, I
talked to a scientists working on just this idea. So
when we come back, we're going to see how technology
can hack your brain to give you extra senses like
(18:14):
sensing magnetic fields or even Wi Fi. Stay with us,
we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about
(18:35):
whether supersensus exist. Now, this last segment is going to
seem a little bit like science fiction. For example, imagine
a scenario where you're a chef or a cook and
you work in a commercial kitchen.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
And somehow you can tell how hot something.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Is just by looking at it. You wouldn't have to
touch it or get near it to tell. You would
just no, you could tell if a pan was the
right temperature, or if a piece of steak was hot enough.
Or imagine, if you could sense the Earth's magnetic field,
you could have a perfect sense of direction. You would
always know where north was, no matter how deep in
(19:13):
a forest you were, or if you were inside a
building or a crowded city you've never been to. Having
these kinds of supersensus may seem like science fiction, but
I promise it's not. It's real science, at least according
to the next expert I talked to, doctor Amber Mymon.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
So my name is Amber Myimon. I'm a researcher at
the interface of neuroscience and human computer interaction. Most of
my research has to do with how we can use
technologies to induce neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Now, I always thought that humans had five senses, but
the first thing I learned from doctor Mymon is that
apparently we have more than five senses.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
So we basically inherited the five senses from philosophers many, many,
many decades ago, such as Aristotle, who said that we
have five basic senses. We have vision, hearing, touch, tastes,
and smell, which people are usually familiar with.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
But we don't have five senses.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
So that's the thing. It's an issue of hot debate.
Right now, I can give you an example. We have
something called approprioceptive sense, which is kind of a sense
of where our body parts are located. So I can
know where my hand is located, for example, even if
I don't see my hand. And then we also have
vestibular system, which controls our sense of balance and more
(20:41):
and more.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yes, scientists can't really agree how many senses we have.
Some people say our ability to sense temperature, or to
feel or heart beat or are breathing, or our sense
of balance, or even our ability to feel pain should
also be included in our list of senses. A sense,
it seems, includes any time we know something about the world,
(21:04):
including our bodies, without thinking about it. It's when we
just know information about the world. Okay, now let's get
to supersensus. Let's get to the topic of supersensus. So
there's the idea of augmenting your senses.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
Right, So the idea of augmenting our senses is generally
changing our sensory abilities in a positive way for some
form of improvement, like for example, Superman and see into
the thermal range. Is it something that I've personally worked
on and it's an interesting time.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
So a supersense is basically giving ourselves the ability to
sense something we currently can't sense, like seeing into the
infrared or having X ray vision, or being able to
sense the Earth's magnetic field. And for that you need technology.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
According to doctor Mama, there are two ways to do this.
The first is to base turn yourself into a cyborg.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
There are methods to augment our senses that are invasive
or they physically interact with our brain. So I can
give you some examples. You can have an implant, for example,
Retinal prosthesis are known as bionic eyes colloquially in day
to day's each These are implants that electrically stimulate whether
(22:28):
it's the retina today. There are also cortical implants that
stimulate the brain directly, and what they do is they
try to physically create the sensory information. They physically activate
the retina, for example, to allow blind people to have
some form of visual perception.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I guess can that be used to augment someone
without a visual impairment? Like, can I use an implant
to make me see better?
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yes, absolutely. There's also more and more awareness of this
concept of augmenting the senses, which means enhancing or extending.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
So one way to extend our senses with technology is
with neural prosthetics. In other words, implanting some device senses
something about the world and then having that device give
that information directly to your nerves or directly to our brains.
Believe it or not, that's something that's being developed right now.
(23:24):
There are retinal implants that can be attached by surgery
inside your eyeball that will then zap the nerves the
back of your eye to tell what the device sees
directly to your brain.
Speaker 5 (23:36):
You can imagine that the device could have.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
A regular camera to allow someone who's blind to see,
or you can imagine using this to give someone a
super sense. For example, you could attach a camera that
also sees infrared or X rays, or that has a
super telescoping lens or a super microscope lens, and then
the implant would zap your nerves tell your brain what
(24:01):
it sees. I could do a whole episode about this idea.
But the more interesting idea that doctor Mymo does research
on is to give someone supersensus without risky invasive eye
or brain surgery.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
But what's really fascinating is that there are also non
invasive ways that take advantage of a couple things. They
take advantage of the fact that we have connections between
our senses. They take advantage of the fact that our
brain is plastic.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Okay, remember when we talked about echolocation. Echolocation is basically
a supersense, although it still relies on sensus we already
have in this case hearing. But echolocation is important because
of two things we mentioned before. The first is that
the brain is flexible, and when you echo locate, you
actually use the parts you usually used to see, the
(24:54):
visual parts of your brain to process what you hear.
Scientists call this cross modal correspondence, which is when your
brain activates connections between the different senses. This is most
noticeable in people with something called synesthesia, which is when,
for example, some people say they can hear colors or
(25:15):
smell sounds.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
So, for example, if you're familiar with Billie Eilish, the singer,
or for El Williams, they have reported that when they
associate automatically, they correlate different sounds and colors, and this
affects their artistic abilities. It affects their music and their
music making abilities. And another example is the painter Kandinski.
(25:40):
He also correlated between colors and sounds but also shapes,
and this very much affected his artwork.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Now, some people have a lot of synesthesia, like the
artist doctor Maima just mentioned, but all of us have
to some degree some cross wiring between our senses. For example,
if I asked you to think of a shape and
I said the word guba again, gouba, most of you
probably thought of something round and maybe big. But now
(26:11):
if I ask you to think of another shape and
I said the word tikiki, you probably thought of something
thin or sharp or something with edges. Doctor Maiman says,
our brains are sort of wired to have associations like that,
and that can be used to give you supersensus. Well,
I'm not eager to implant a chip in my eye
(26:33):
or my brain. So this idea that maybe we can
augment my senses just by kind of taking advantage of
these connections between the census, it's super interesting. Tell us
about that idea.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
We have the concept of novel senses, which we can
call supersensus, which is basically taking information in the world
that's not censor information such as air quality, pollution, or
even Wi Fi information that's out there in the world,
and conveying it to people in a sensory way. So,
(27:03):
for example, I can convey Wi Fi information as tactile
information on my body.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Okay, here's the idea. Instead of directly connecting say an
infrared camera or compassed directly into your brain or nervous system,
you could have that device talk to your brain through
one of your other senses. So, for example, you could
wear a belt that vibrated the closer you are to
pointing to the north pole. Or you could wear an
(27:33):
infrared camera that played a special sound for you whenever
you were looking at something hot, or you could wear
glasses that turn pink the closer you are to a
Wi Fi signal. And at first you might find this
kind of annoying, or you'd be very self conscious about
these vibrations or sounds or colors. But after a while,
(27:53):
doctor Maima says, because of your brain's plasticity, you'll just
get used to it and it just becomes another one
of your senses. Okay, this will make more sense with
an example, So Let's say you wanted to give a
chef or a cook the ability to see into the
infrared or to tell how hot or cold something is
(28:14):
just by looking at it. So how does this technology work.
There's a camera, right, and the camera is recording the temperature,
and you're conveying that temperature to the person via sound.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Exactly, that's precisely what we're doing. We're taking the thermal
information acquired through the thermal camera and through an algorithm
and six stages of mapping that I won't get into,
and we divided it into hot, cold, and neutral.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Okay, So imagine the chef is wearing a camera and
whenever they look at something hot or cold or room temperature,
they hear a different sound. For example, whenever the infrared
camera sees something it knows is hot, it would play
this sound. When the chef faces something the camera knows
is cold, you would play this sound. And that's enough
(29:04):
to give you a super sense.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
And this was very intuitive. People with fifteen minutes of
training could learn to identify thermal information hot and cold
information that is invisible to them through their sense of vision.
For example, they could recognize a cold item in a
bag that they couldn't.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
See, now, what's cool is that. In doctor Memo's experiment,
the sound they played also told the person a little
about where the hot or cold object was by changing
the pitch of the sound.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
We didn't want them to only perceive the hot and cold.
We also wanted them to know where something hot and
where something cold is. We played back to them the
auditory information using pitch manipulation. If a hot item was
located higher up, it would have the hot sound, but
(30:06):
also it would have a higher pitched sound, and people
could learn to understand this very quickly, could learn to
perceive this form of information very quickly.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
So, for example, if the chef in the kitchen was
facing four pots on a stove, the computer would play
a specific sound to them, and they would instantly and
intuitively just know which of the four pots was hot
and which was coal.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
And finally, we tested them. We tested them both on
their ability to locate objects through sound, and we tested
them on their ability to recognize the temperature of objects
through sound. And ultimately they got up to something like
eighty seven percent abilities for recognizing thermal information that's invisible
(30:56):
to their eyes.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
And so you're cooking, you're cooking, and I'm training this.
So now when I see a pen, there's a sound
plane in my ear, but I'm not thinking about the sound,
but I know somehow that how hot that pen is?
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Wow, that's super cool, so.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
Intuitive to the extent that over time you don't even
hear it as sounds. You perceive it as thermal information.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
And so suddenly you have the kind of the superpowers
of a snake or superman.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Absolutely, we want to give these chefs superman abilities.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, oh wow, Well, chess are superheroes already.
Speaker 5 (31:33):
Chefs are superheroes, at least the good ones. All right.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think the big takeaway of this episode is that
supersensus are possible.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
It's within our power to teach.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Ourselves new ways to sense the world, like an echo location,
and it's within current technology to give us census we
didn't think we're possible, like sensing magnetic fields or sensing.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
Temperature from afar.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Need to be firm krypton or get bitten by a
radioactive spider, or even have something implanted in you, you
can use the power of the brain's ability to adapt
to gain or sensus. Now you might be thinking, where
does this end? What will this do to humans? That
was the last question I asked doctor Maimund. Well, maybe
(32:21):
just to wrap it up, what do you think it
would do to us as people? As humans if we
have supersensus, Like let's say suddenly I'm walking around and
I'm aware of the temperature of things, and I'm aware
of how strong the WiFi is, and I'm aware of
the air quality, all of this at the same time,
what do you think it's going to do to us?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
So ultimately, at the very simplest level, it will increase
our performance abilities, right, It'll maximize what we can do
in this world. It's really getting people to maximize their
potential and stretch their brain to its life limits and
find out what we can do that we don't currently do.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
All Right, I hope that all made sense and maybe
even super sense. Thanks for joining us. See you next
time you've been listening to science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio
written and produced by me or Hey Cham, edited by
Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and
(33:30):
mixer k cy peprom And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign
stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
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