July 2, 2024 • 20 mins
Gracias al sistema sensorial percibimos millones de estímulos del mundo que nos rodea, desde cambios ínfimos en la presión del aire hasta la presencia de sustancias químicas en el ambiente. En el colegio nos enseñan que nuestro cerebro cuenta con cinco sentidos para que afrontemos bien equipados los desafíos de la vida, pero algunos científicos hablan de que disponemos al menos de once. Luces... ¡acción! Nuestro cerebro se pone a trabajar nada más abrir los ojos, que funcionan como cámaras de cine: sus lentes recogen las radiaciones luminosas que emiten o reflejan los objetos que nos rodean y las mandan al laboratorio neuronal para traducirlas en imágenes. El tejido encargado de capturar la luz es la retina. De allí parten una cuadrilla de neuronas especializadas en detectar el movimiento; otras que responden solo al brillo; otras, al color; y otras que solo se fijan en el tamaño, la forma o la orientación. La retina lanza los datos al tálamo, el primer filtro del cerebro, la mesa de mezclas visual. Ahí los datos se entrecruzan antes de ser proyectados a la corteza visual del encéfalo. Y entonces, voilà!, se hace la imagen. Claro que solo la fóvea, una minúscula zona de la retina, ve en alta definición. El resto de nuestro campo de visión se procesa en baja, ligeramente pixelado, por economía de recursos. Porque si cada escena de la vida se filmase en HD, el diámetro del nervio óptico debería ser incluso mayor que el del propio globo ocular y nos haría falta un cerebro bastante más voluminoso. Déjanos tu comentario en Ivoox o Spotify, o escríbenos a podcast@zinetmedia.es ¿Nos ayudas? Comparte nuestro contenido en redes sociales . Texto: Elena Sanz Dirección, locución y producción: Iván Patxi Gómez Gallego @ivanpatxi Contacto de publicidad en podcast: podcast@zinetmedia.es
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Thanks to the sensory system, weperceive millions of stimuli from the world around
us from tiny changes in air pressureto the presence of chemicals in the environment.
At school, they teach us thatour brain has five senses so that
we face the challenges of life wellequipped. But some scientists talk about having
at least eleven very interesting podcasts,great reports of very interesting. Presents the
(00:39):
science of the eleven sitters and twoa text by Elena sand Luces Our brain
(01:07):
starts to work just to open theeyes that function as cinema cameras. Their
lenses collect the luminous radiations that emitor reflect the objects that surround us and
send them to the neuronal laboratory totranslate them into images The tissue in charge
of capturing the light is the retina. From there a group of neurons specialized
in detecting movement depart, others thatrespond only to brightness, others to color
(01:33):
and others that only fix on size, shape or orientation. The retina throws
the data into the thalamus, thefirst filter of the brain the visual mixing
table. There the data intersect beforebeing projected to the visual cortex of the
brain and then buala makes the image. Of course only phobia a tiny area
(02:04):
of the retina sees in high definition. The rest of our field of vision
is processed in low slightly pixelated byresource economy, because if every scene of
life were filmed in HD, thediameter of the optic nerve should be even
greater than that of the eyeball itselfand we would need a much more voluminous
brain. That is why we mustredirect our gaze whenever we want to identify
(02:28):
an object, recognize a face orread a text. German scientists at the
University of Munich recently demonstrated that thefocus of phobia is decided quickly and unconsciously,
and that the criterion of what isimportant and what is not in the
visual field is dictated by a neuralnetwork. The ismic system, which uses
a very intelligent mechanism that has notyet been able to move robots. Imitating
(02:53):
the function of the eye on themachines is for now impossible and that'
s what we' ve said sofar. Of that, this sensory organ
is only the tip of the iceberg. Human vision requires a long series of
calculations, mathematical operations, and inferencesthat scientists are still trying to decipher.
(03:13):
They know that each eye sees twodimensions and that the three- dimensional image
is constructed mentally and also that withincomplete visual data reaching the brain, it
is forced to fill gaps. Theinterpretation of the stimuli generated in our eyes
is conditioned by assumptions we make aboutthe environment, but the final result of
(03:36):
what the mind sees is very precise. But we don' t just use
our eyes to see. We alsoeat with them, because they are the
first elements of the body to decidewhether a food is safe and appetizing or
not. You' re going tolook at food photos to experience a voracious
appetite so much, so some scientistsaccuse the bombing of the porno gastro of
(04:00):
suggestive food photos of altering consumption habitsand promoting obesity. Nor is it crazy
to say that we walk with oureyes, especially if we move away from
the asphalt and tread rough terrain.The locomotion and coordination of movements depend closely
on the vision where we put theeye we put the foot. According to
(04:23):
a study published in sel the eyeadvances and alternates its gaze between what we
do at each moment and what wewill do two or three steps later.
It is understood that the view consumesmore resources than any other sense. Neurobiologists
have calculated that thirty percent of thecortex is used to interpret what the eyes
perceive a lot compared to the eightpercent we devote to tactile information and the
(04:47):
three percent destined to listen. Millionsof years ago it wasn' t like
that. There was a time whensmelling ruled over the five senses, when
the brain of vertebrates was much moredevoted to snooping through the information. In
(05:13):
remote times, he sniffed to findfood, to find a partner, to
detect territories where it was not convenientto prowl, to identify predators and to
leave by foot. Then the nosewas losing ground in favor of the eyes.
But part of that ancient footprint laststo understand to what extent smell is
(05:33):
exceptional, you just have to talkto Mary Lucero for a while. This
physiologist at the University of Utah saysthat, unlike the sight of the ear
or touch, there is no anatomicalstructure in the nose that protects primary neurons
from subsisting. From the moment we' re born until the parca visits us.
(05:54):
Olfactory neurons are directly exposed to harmfulchemicals, microbes, and particles that
continuously damage them, so they haveto regenerate at any time in life.
New neurons are being born in theolfactory epithelium. Add a star. If
you lose them all in a cold, it will take only six weeks for
(06:15):
your nose to repopulate. From thatpoint of view, it is the envy
of the rest of the senses.Another key difference is that odors cannot be
classified as easily as light or sounds. We can talk about colors, but
it' s very difficult to describeodors verbally. Each person gives different names
to the same aromatic molecules reflect thesky the navy blue. We always see
(06:39):
it as navy blue, but thesensitivity of olfactory neurons depends on things as
diverse as the other odors that snortour nutritional level. We are always hungry
or satisfied with the reproductive state ifwe are awake or if we suffer stress,
as this researcher has shown. Thethird rarity of smell, perhaps the
(07:06):
most important one, is that thenose does not send the information directly to
the brain conscious areas. Instead,the olfactory data are previously turned around through
deep areas of the brain, suchas the hippocampus, the tonsil and the
hypothalamus from which they emerge loaded withemotional nuances and has a why. When
(07:29):
survival depended on smell, it wasimportant to record well the location of an
odor and the associated emotion fear ofthe predator, attraction by the couple reward
for tasty food, explains Lucero.We had to visit the centers of memory
and emotions and we still noticed itin that certain aromas bring up very lived
memories on a very personal level.I may not say anything to many when
(07:54):
they smell a banana, but ifI sense its smell inside a paper bag,
it comes to mind of a veryclear image of my father, who
was carrying this fruit packed in thecar in case we were hungry when he
was going to pick us up atschool evokes the researcher. Although other species
outnumber us in this sense, humansare not bad at all. We have
(08:16):
four hundred different types of olfactory receptors. The third part is a mouse,
but we handle them so extraordinarily wellthat with them we distinguish more than a
billion different aromatic molecules. That doesnot detract from the olfactory feats of some
animals. According to Lucero, mosquitoessmell the carbon dioxide we exhale. Male
(08:37):
moths detect the pheromones released by femalesfour and a half kilometers away and sharks.
And sharks can smell a drop ofdiluted blood in a million drops of
water. And the dogs. Pigsand even if they are less known,
elephants have more neurons than we doand get better scores in the olfactory tes.
(09:03):
In close relationship with smell is totaste a sense that does not usually
work only the language. It hasthousands of taste buds that recognize not only
the four classic salty, sweet,bitter and acidic flavors, but also the
umamií typical of soy sauce and tomatoand the fatty flavor. When we put
(09:24):
food in your mouth, your moleculesdissolve in saliva and you like them.
But at the same time, touchcomes into action through other lingual sensors that
identify the consistency and temperature of food. And all that is mixed with olfactory
information. It is estimated that 80percent of the taste of food is actually
(09:45):
smell. That' s why acold can make food not taste cardboard.
For its part, the touch wefeel through the whole skin as intrinsically social
beings that we are. Tactical sensehelps us survive. That' s why
the dermis is filled with a seriesof nerves that respond to soft friction very
(10:07):
similar to those of pain. Onlythat they perform the opposite function report that
what touches them not only does notthreaten them, but can fill them with
pleasure, caress or be caressed.It produces positive sensations. It has been
shown that emotional tactile exchange, especiallyin the early years of life, is
essential for good health. The speedwith which the brain processes the touch is
(10:31):
accelerated in the blind who also havea sharp sense of the ear and detect
stimuli. More useful sounds. Itis what is known as the raichals effect,
but insuper hearing cones, the trineof the birds, the dripping of
a tap, the human voices,the noises, the music and even the
silence, generate vibrations in the airthat when they reach the ear, make
(10:54):
oscillate the eardrum first and the bonesof the middle ear, the and the
cr the cochlea. Then, atthe end of the road, reverberation translates
to nerve signals. They are differentif the piano gives a yes or a
la, if it vibrates the stringof a guitar or the vocal cords of
a speaker or singer. Then itall ends up in the brain that has
(11:22):
its own mixing table to go downand up volumes. At the convenience of
meeting a childhood friend at a crowdedparty and you want to talk to him
calmly. You don' t haveto be absent from the meeting. Even
in a noisy environment, the temporalcortex of the brain is able to filter
the voice of an interlocutor and completelyignore the rest. According to a Californian
(11:46):
study, I recently published you.Born in the higher structures of the brain
does not reflect the whole acoustic environment, but only what we want or need
to hear. The other voices andnoises disappear as if they were mute,
as when you press the mut buttonon the TV controller. In part,
(12:07):
this is possible because every neuron inthe auditory cortex is able to change at
every moment The frequency range to whichthe brain responds in general is extremely plastic,
but the hearing cortex comes out nothingunusual, bearing in mind that the
acoustic environment is changing all the time, more than the visual and that the
(12:28):
intelligent thing is to be able tocontinuously adapt to new sound situations and develop
an ear like Ray Charles' s. If your sight fails, wherever it
comes from. All the information hecollects. Our perception stops at the brain,
which is the real sensory organ.On second thought, the senses cannot
be considered too precise. They donot provide exact measurements of, for example,
(12:54):
the speed and acceleration to which acar approaches the pedestrian passage or the
temperature of the water, the benchor the properties of the material from which
a ring is made. They onlycollect inconsistent and disparate data that someone must
integrate, process and interpret in orderto draw conclusions. And that someone is
none other than the thinking organ thatactually the one who sees hears smells,
(13:18):
hears feel and tries to deduce whetherthat ring is gold or is a simple
trinket. If you' re listeningto me, you like my voice or
you don' t like my voiceas far as the senses are concerned,
(13:43):
the brain doesn' t set upwatertight compartments. It' s all mixed
up. Just look at the storyof Daniel Kiss, an American who was
born with bilateral retino blastoma, atype of retinal cancer. The tumor did
not return and at only seven monthsof age, he stretched it in the
right eye at thirteen months did thesame thing with the left one went blind,
(14:05):
but he did not resign himself froma very young age that began to
develop a technique that consists of snappingthe tongue and detecting through the echo the
objects around him. That' swhy Batman gets nicknamed. The bat man
and is capable of hiking or mountainbiking like any person endowed with vision,
although the most amazing and what intereststhe neuroscientists especially sees his case is that,
(14:30):
when listening to the echo, hisvisual cortex builds images his brain goes
from the echo. There' snothing there. Another interesting demonstration that the
brain does not compartmentalize the senses.We find it in the multisensory illusions.
(14:54):
For example, if you see lipsutter the syllable and simultaneously listen to the
sound go your brain will hear da. It is called a mat gork effect
and is produced by an interaction betweenhearing and vision in speech perception. When
the auditory component of one sound iscombined with the visual component of another,
(15:15):
the brain illusoryly interprets it as athird sound. It is a phenomenon that
shows that our perceptive experiences are theproduct of a complex process of mixing.
In other cases, they are thesight and touch in which they interact to
create, for example, the illusionof the rubber hand. If we put
one of these false hands before usand at the same time cover one arm,
(15:39):
so it looks like the rubber oneis part of our body. If
someone caresses him, we will feelthat he is touching our real hand or
view and taste. If we drinka strawberry soda dyed greenish yellow, we
identify its flavor with lemon. Onthe other hand, other animals have an
enviable sixth sense. Birds, butterflies, monarchs, whales and bears have a
(16:03):
kind of internacular compass that detects inthe Earth' s magnetic field and is
oriented without the need for GPS.Why not humans who lack magnetic sense.
It is still to be seen andis the subject of debate. Joseph Kirvings,
a gebiologist at the California Institute ofTechnology, is one of the leading
(16:26):
researchers committed to confirming or denying itonce and for all. There' s
no reason to think it doesn't exist, but if we have it,
it looks like it' s unconscious. In most migratory animals, this
sensory capacity depends on biogenic magnetite crystalsthat are small magnets, biochemicals and genetics.
Explains There is another recent alternative hypothesisthat places the capacity of magnet reception
(16:52):
into an eye protein called create four, a type of cryptochrome. But according
to Kirving, there is not enoughevidence and it does not explain all the
observations as well as how it does. The theory of magnetite. As we
speak to Kirving, he brings outanother sixth sense candidate, that of gravity,
which he considers to be a greatforgotten. It is true that when
(17:17):
Tres anointed he described the five senses, many centuries before Newton' s birth,
and the concept of gravitational was aliento him. But by now it
is quite clear to Kirsving that theperception of gravity is a separate sensory modality.
Although it derives from ciliated cells,just like those of the auditory system,
it allows us to maintain balance andwalk without giving us any sharps against
(17:41):
the ground. On the other hand, there are many researchers who argue that
thermo- reception, i e theability to distinguish between cold and hot,
should also be considered an independent senserather than a quality of touch. And
so do some people about the pain, noticeception, and perception of one'
s own body, the exception itself. This would add up to a total
(18:04):
of nine senses. What could happento eleven if the magnetic and another equally
controversial, the bomeronasal are confirmed.Human beings have a bomeronasal organ, that
is, a legacy of the pheromonedetector that ants use to mark the way
from food to anthill or the femalesof many species to attract males when they
(18:26):
want to mate and to regulate manyother incentive responses. Many scientists claim that
this organ is only an atrophied,completely atrophied evolutionary vestige. Others are not
(18:48):
so clear, including Birsving. Itis true that genes that match those of
mice are pseudogenes that we do notexpress. Admit it. However, we
do not yet know if all thegenes related to pheromones are disabled. And
there is scientific literature that speaks ofbehaviors compatible with the detection of some of
(19:08):
these substances. He says it isa controversial issue, just as is the
human magnetic sense, of which hewill soon publish an article. Many scientists
think that the imaging or reception systemin humans should be lost and that the
same is true of the nasal boomer, but they could also be both active
(19:30):
and sending data to the brain.Without us being aware, there will one
day have to expand the sensory catalogue. Thank you for listening to the very interesting podcasts
Thanks to the sensory system, weperceive millions of stimuli from the world around
us from tiny changes in air pressureto the presence of chemicals in the environment.
At school, they teach us thatour brain has five senses so that
we face the challenges of life wellequipped. But some scientists talk about having
at least eleven very interesting podcasts,great reports of very interesting. Presents the
(00:39):
science of the eleven sitters and twoa text by Elena sand Luces Our brain
(01:07):
starts to work just to open theeyes that function as cinema cameras. Their
lenses collect the luminous radiations that emitor reflect the objects that surround us and
send them to the neuronal laboratory totranslate them into images The tissue in charge
of capturing the light is the retina. From there a group of neurons specialized
in detecting movement depart, others thatrespond only to brightness, others to color
(01:33):
and others that only fix on size, shape or orientation. The retina throws
the data into the thalamus, thefirst filter of the brain the visual mixing
table. There the data intersect beforebeing projected to the visual cortex of the
brain and then buala makes the image. Of course only phobia a tiny area
(02:04):
of the retina sees in high definition. The rest of our field of vision
is processed in low slightly pixelated byresource economy, because if every scene of
life were filmed in HD, thediameter of the optic nerve should be even
greater than that of the eyeball itselfand we would need a much more voluminous
brain. That is why we mustredirect our gaze whenever we want to identify
(02:28):
an object, recognize a face orread a text. German scientists at the
University of Munich recently demonstrated that thefocus of phobia is decided quickly and unconsciously,
and that the criterion of what isimportant and what is not in the
visual field is dictated by a neuralnetwork. The ismic system, which uses
a very intelligent mechanism that has notyet been able to move robots. Imitating
(02:53):
the function of the eye on themachines is for now impossible and that'
s what we' ve said sofar. Of that, this sensory organ
is only the tip of the iceberg. Human vision requires a long series of
calculations, mathematical operations, and inferencesthat scientists are still trying to decipher.
(03:13):
They know that each eye sees twodimensions and that the three- dimensional image
is constructed mentally and also that withincomplete visual data reaching the brain, it
is forced to fill gaps. Theinterpretation of the stimuli generated in our eyes
is conditioned by assumptions we make aboutthe environment, but the final result of
(03:36):
what the mind sees is very precise. But we don' t just use
our eyes to see. We alsoeat with them, because they are the
first elements of the body to decidewhether a food is safe and appetizing or
not. You' re going tolook at food photos to experience a voracious
appetite so much, so some scientistsaccuse the bombing of the porno gastro of
(04:00):
suggestive food photos of altering consumption habitsand promoting obesity. Nor is it crazy
to say that we walk with oureyes, especially if we move away from
the asphalt and tread rough terrain.The locomotion and coordination of movements depend closely
on the vision where we put theeye we put the foot. According to
(04:23):
a study published in sel the eyeadvances and alternates its gaze between what we
do at each moment and what wewill do two or three steps later.
It is understood that the view consumesmore resources than any other sense. Neurobiologists
have calculated that thirty percent of thecortex is used to interpret what the eyes
perceive a lot compared to the eightpercent we devote to tactile information and the
(04:47):
three percent destined to listen. Millionsof years ago it wasn' t like
that. There was a time whensmelling ruled over the five senses, when
the brain of vertebrates was much moredevoted to snooping through the information. In
(05:13):
remote times, he sniffed to findfood, to find a partner, to
detect territories where it was not convenientto prowl, to identify predators and to
leave by foot. Then the nosewas losing ground in favor of the eyes.
But part of that ancient footprint laststo understand to what extent smell is
(05:33):
exceptional, you just have to talkto Mary Lucero for a while. This
physiologist at the University of Utah saysthat, unlike the sight of the ear
or touch, there is no anatomicalstructure in the nose that protects primary neurons
from subsisting. From the moment we' re born until the parca visits us.
(05:54):
Olfactory neurons are directly exposed to harmfulchemicals, microbes, and particles that
continuously damage them, so they haveto regenerate at any time in life.
New neurons are being born in theolfactory epithelium. Add a star. If
you lose them all in a cold, it will take only six weeks for
(06:15):
your nose to repopulate. From thatpoint of view, it is the envy
of the rest of the senses.Another key difference is that odors cannot be
classified as easily as light or sounds. We can talk about colors, but
it' s very difficult to describeodors verbally. Each person gives different names
to the same aromatic molecules reflect thesky the navy blue. We always see
(06:39):
it as navy blue, but thesensitivity of olfactory neurons depends on things as
diverse as the other odors that snortour nutritional level. We are always hungry
or satisfied with the reproductive state ifwe are awake or if we suffer stress,
as this researcher has shown. Thethird rarity of smell, perhaps the
(07:06):
most important one, is that thenose does not send the information directly to
the brain conscious areas. Instead,the olfactory data are previously turned around through
deep areas of the brain, suchas the hippocampus, the tonsil and the
hypothalamus from which they emerge loaded withemotional nuances and has a why. When
(07:29):
survival depended on smell, it wasimportant to record well the location of an
odor and the associated emotion fear ofthe predator, attraction by the couple reward
for tasty food, explains Lucero.We had to visit the centers of memory
and emotions and we still noticed itin that certain aromas bring up very lived
memories on a very personal level.I may not say anything to many when
(07:54):
they smell a banana, but ifI sense its smell inside a paper bag,
it comes to mind of a veryclear image of my father, who
was carrying this fruit packed in thecar in case we were hungry when he
was going to pick us up atschool evokes the researcher. Although other species
outnumber us in this sense, humansare not bad at all. We have
(08:16):
four hundred different types of olfactory receptors. The third part is a mouse,
but we handle them so extraordinarily wellthat with them we distinguish more than a
billion different aromatic molecules. That doesnot detract from the olfactory feats of some
animals. According to Lucero, mosquitoessmell the carbon dioxide we exhale. Male
(08:37):
moths detect the pheromones released by femalesfour and a half kilometers away and sharks.
And sharks can smell a drop ofdiluted blood in a million drops of
water. And the dogs. Pigsand even if they are less known,
elephants have more neurons than we doand get better scores in the olfactory tes.
(09:03):
In close relationship with smell is totaste a sense that does not usually
work only the language. It hasthousands of taste buds that recognize not only
the four classic salty, sweet,bitter and acidic flavors, but also the
umamií typical of soy sauce and tomatoand the fatty flavor. When we put
(09:24):
food in your mouth, your moleculesdissolve in saliva and you like them.
But at the same time, touchcomes into action through other lingual sensors that
identify the consistency and temperature of food. And all that is mixed with olfactory
information. It is estimated that 80percent of the taste of food is actually
(09:45):
smell. That' s why acold can make food not taste cardboard.
For its part, the touch wefeel through the whole skin as intrinsically social
beings that we are. Tactical sensehelps us survive. That' s why
the dermis is filled with a seriesof nerves that respond to soft friction very
(10:07):
similar to those of pain. Onlythat they perform the opposite function report that
what touches them not only does notthreaten them, but can fill them with
pleasure, caress or be caressed.It produces positive sensations. It has been
shown that emotional tactile exchange, especiallyin the early years of life, is
essential for good health. The speedwith which the brain processes the touch is
(10:31):
accelerated in the blind who also havea sharp sense of the ear and detect
stimuli. More useful sounds. Itis what is known as the raichals effect,
but insuper hearing cones, the trineof the birds, the dripping of
a tap, the human voices,the noises, the music and even the
silence, generate vibrations in the airthat when they reach the ear, make
(10:54):
oscillate the eardrum first and the bonesof the middle ear, the and the
cr the cochlea. Then, atthe end of the road, reverberation translates
to nerve signals. They are differentif the piano gives a yes or a
la, if it vibrates the stringof a guitar or the vocal cords of
a speaker or singer. Then itall ends up in the brain that has
(11:22):
its own mixing table to go downand up volumes. At the convenience of
meeting a childhood friend at a crowdedparty and you want to talk to him
calmly. You don' t haveto be absent from the meeting. Even
in a noisy environment, the temporalcortex of the brain is able to filter
the voice of an interlocutor and completelyignore the rest. According to a Californian
(11:46):
study, I recently published you.Born in the higher structures of the brain
does not reflect the whole acoustic environment, but only what we want or need
to hear. The other voices andnoises disappear as if they were mute,
as when you press the mut buttonon the TV controller. In part,
(12:07):
this is possible because every neuron inthe auditory cortex is able to change at
every moment The frequency range to whichthe brain responds in general is extremely plastic,
but the hearing cortex comes out nothingunusual, bearing in mind that the
acoustic environment is changing all the time, more than the visual and that the
(12:28):
intelligent thing is to be able tocontinuously adapt to new sound situations and develop
an ear like Ray Charles' s. If your sight fails, wherever it
comes from. All the information hecollects. Our perception stops at the brain,
which is the real sensory organ.On second thought, the senses cannot
be considered too precise. They donot provide exact measurements of, for example,
(12:54):
the speed and acceleration to which acar approaches the pedestrian passage or the
temperature of the water, the benchor the properties of the material from which
a ring is made. They onlycollect inconsistent and disparate data that someone must
integrate, process and interpret in orderto draw conclusions. And that someone is
none other than the thinking organ thatactually the one who sees hears smells,
(13:18):
hears feel and tries to deduce whetherthat ring is gold or is a simple
trinket. If you' re listeningto me, you like my voice or
you don' t like my voiceas far as the senses are concerned,
(13:43):
the brain doesn' t set upwatertight compartments. It' s all mixed
up. Just look at the storyof Daniel Kiss, an American who was
born with bilateral retino blastoma, atype of retinal cancer. The tumor did
not return and at only seven monthsof age, he stretched it in the
right eye at thirteen months did thesame thing with the left one went blind,
(14:05):
but he did not resign himself froma very young age that began to
develop a technique that consists of snappingthe tongue and detecting through the echo the
objects around him. That' swhy Batman gets nicknamed. The bat man
and is capable of hiking or mountainbiking like any person endowed with vision,
although the most amazing and what intereststhe neuroscientists especially sees his case is that,
(14:30):
when listening to the echo, hisvisual cortex builds images his brain goes
from the echo. There' snothing there. Another interesting demonstration that the
brain does not compartmentalize the senses.We find it in the multisensory illusions.
(14:54):
For example, if you see lipsutter the syllable and simultaneously listen to the
sound go your brain will hear da. It is called a mat gork effect
and is produced by an interaction betweenhearing and vision in speech perception. When
the auditory component of one sound iscombined with the visual component of another,
(15:15):
the brain illusoryly interprets it as athird sound. It is a phenomenon that
shows that our perceptive experiences are theproduct of a complex process of mixing.
In other cases, they are thesight and touch in which they interact to
create, for example, the illusionof the rubber hand. If we put
one of these false hands before usand at the same time cover one arm,
(15:39):
so it looks like the rubber oneis part of our body. If
someone caresses him, we will feelthat he is touching our real hand or
view and taste. If we drinka strawberry soda dyed greenish yellow, we
identify its flavor with lemon. Onthe other hand, other animals have an
enviable sixth sense. Birds, butterflies, monarchs, whales and bears have a
(16:03):
kind of internacular compass that detects inthe Earth' s magnetic field and is
oriented without the need for GPS.Why not humans who lack magnetic sense.
It is still to be seen andis the subject of debate. Joseph Kirvings,
a gebiologist at the California Institute ofTechnology, is one of the leading
(16:26):
researchers committed to confirming or denying itonce and for all. There' s
no reason to think it doesn't exist, but if we have it,
it looks like it' s unconscious. In most migratory animals, this
sensory capacity depends on biogenic magnetite crystalsthat are small magnets, biochemicals and genetics.
Explains There is another recent alternative hypothesisthat places the capacity of magnet reception
(16:52):
into an eye protein called create four, a type of cryptochrome. But according
to Kirving, there is not enoughevidence and it does not explain all the
observations as well as how it does. The theory of magnetite. As we
speak to Kirving, he brings outanother sixth sense candidate, that of gravity,
which he considers to be a greatforgotten. It is true that when
(17:17):
Tres anointed he described the five senses, many centuries before Newton' s birth,
and the concept of gravitational was aliento him. But by now it
is quite clear to Kirsving that theperception of gravity is a separate sensory modality.
Although it derives from ciliated cells,just like those of the auditory system,
it allows us to maintain balance andwalk without giving us any sharps against
(17:41):
the ground. On the other hand, there are many researchers who argue that
thermo- reception, i e theability to distinguish between cold and hot,
should also be considered an independent senserather than a quality of touch. And
so do some people about the pain, noticeception, and perception of one'
s own body, the exception itself. This would add up to a total
(18:04):
of nine senses. What could happento eleven if the magnetic and another equally
controversial, the bomeronasal are confirmed.Human beings have a bomeronasal organ, that
is, a legacy of the pheromonedetector that ants use to mark the way
from food to anthill or the femalesof many species to attract males when they
(18:26):
want to mate and to regulate manyother incentive responses. Many scientists claim that
this organ is only an atrophied,completely atrophied evolutionary vestige. Others are not
(18:48):
so clear, including Birsving. Itis true that genes that match those of
mice are pseudogenes that we do notexpress. Admit it. However, we
do not yet know if all thegenes related to pheromones are disabled. And
there is scientific literature that speaks ofbehaviors compatible with the detection of some of
(19:08):
these substances. He says it isa controversial issue, just as is the
human magnetic sense, of which hewill soon publish an article. Many scientists
think that the imaging or reception systemin humans should be lost and that the
same is true of the nasal boomer, but they could also be both active
(19:30):
and sending data to the brain.Without us being aware, there will one
day have to expand the sensory catalogue. Thank you for listening to the very interesting podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.