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I'm more curious about a different idea. If you hook up electrodes to a tongue and then start activating its sensors according to the amount of light being rece

I'm more curious about a different idea. If you hook up electrodes to a tongue and then start activating its sensors according to the amount of light being received, people quickly develop the ability to see via their tongue. So what happens when you encode visual information into sound in such a way as to have a sound-to-environment signal and you just keep that active and running real time. We already know that this mechanism exists in nature and can even be developed in humans, since echo-location is a thing. Edit: It occurs to me that actually doing sensory experiments like this might really mess with someones head... maybe not a good idea to play around with it casually. Edit 2: If we were going to swap out one of our senses for another, which should we get rid of and which should we gain?

dr_zoidberg 10y ago
Actually there are around (and have been for a few years aready) some glasses that scan the image you'd see and translate that into a sound that you need a bit training to understand as an image[0]. Some people have gotten used to them, while others have gone the way of the bat and learned to echolocate[1]. [0] http://gizmodo.com/these-synthesia-glasses-help-blind-people-see-via-son-745027691 http://gizmodo.com/these-synthesia-glasses-help-blind-people... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
Houshalter 10y ago
It's been done and it works. I believe they just map the image to a spectrogram and convert it to audio: https://www.seeingwithsound.com/ https://www.seeingwithsound.com/
Srikanth 10y ago
Your comment reminded me the TED talk "How a blind astronomer found a way to hear the stars"[1]. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/wanda_diaz_merced_how_a_blind_astronomer_found_a_way_to_hear_the_stars?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/wanda_diaz_merced_how_a_blind_astr...
bshanks 10y ago
Here's an Android app that converts images from the phone's camera to sounds as a tool for the blind: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe&hl...

dr_zoidberg 10y ago

Actually there are around (and have been for a few years aready) some glasses that scan the image you'd see and translate that into a sound that you need a bit training to understand as an image[0]. Some people have gotten used to them, while others have gone the way of the bat and learned to echolocate[1]. [0] http://gizmodo.com/these-synthesia-glasses-help-blind-people-see-via-son-745027691 http://gizmodo.com/these-synthesia-glasses-help-blind-people... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

Houshalter 10y ago

It's been done and it works. I believe they just map the image to a spectrogram and convert it to audio: https://www.seeingwithsound.com/ https://www.seeingwithsound.com/

Srikanth 10y ago

Your comment reminded me the TED talk "How a blind astronomer found a way to hear the stars"[1]. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/wanda_diaz_merced_how_a_blind_astronomer_found_a_way_to_hear_the_stars?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/wanda_diaz_merced_how_a_blind_astr...

bshanks 10y ago

Here's an Android app that converts images from the phone's camera to sounds as a tool for the blind: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe&hl...