4 ms·

I remember reading about people that implanted small magnets into their fingertips (only on one finger), and were this able to feel the electromagnetic field.

by daemin 12y ago

I remember reading about people that implanted small magnets into their fingertips (only on one finger), and were this able to feel the electromagnetic field. There's also the people that got hearing implants when they were adults, and have adapted to the new sensation of hearing without much difficulty. To me the human brain is quite adaptable, it is able to work around so many deficiencies or other "defects", so I would be very surprised if adapting to this new visual input was a big problem.

learc83 12y ago
There are a lot of examples of sensory augmentation like what you're talking about with magnets. Basically the brain seems to be able to adapt to almost any sensory input. There's a company that was testing a device that turned the pixels on a low res camera into electrical impulses to a tongue mounted sensor plate. There was a study where people had a belt fitted with vibrating motors and a compass so that the part of the belt facing north always vibrated. The people in the study begin to feel where north was. There was a another study where an input from an ultrasonic rangefinder on a scalpel was converted to an electrical stimulation and surgeons could feel how close their scalpel was to a surface.
neuronic 12y ago
I am not sure but isn´t the magnet-in-finger thing just caused by kinetic energy of the magnet in response to EM fields? The magnet would move a little in the finger (e.g. vibrate) and your nerves perceive a sensation equivalent to touch. The augmentation ends at the finger and the brain never has to adapt that much at all. The hearing implants are a different story altogether because hearing is already fully developed in the newborn's brains [1]. So if you have hearing issues due to biomechanical problems in your ear, the brain wouldn't need to adapt at all when these issues are removed. You would merely form new memories from new sounds but the sensory processing works normally from second zero onward. And if hearing is impaired due to neurological issues then I severely doubt any current implant technology would change that. That would need to be much closer to treating a stroke patient. The human brain is extremely adaptable, yes. Much more so in young people than in old. And apparently there is some variance with brain region (responsibility) as well. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1061088/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1061088/

by daemin 12y ago

learc83 12y ago

There are a lot of examples of sensory augmentation like what you're talking about with magnets. Basically the brain seems to be able to adapt to almost any sensory input. There's a company that was testing a device that turned the pixels on a low res camera into electrical impulses to a tongue mounted sensor plate. There was a study where people had a belt fitted with vibrating motors and a compass so that the part of the belt facing north always vibrated. The people in the study begin to feel where north was. There was a another study where an input from an ultrasonic rangefinder on a scalpel was converted to an electrical stimulation and surgeons could feel how close their scalpel was to a surface.

neuronic 12y ago

I am not sure but isn´t the magnet-in-finger thing just caused by kinetic energy of the magnet in response to EM fields? The magnet would move a little in the finger (e.g. vibrate) and your nerves perceive a sensation equivalent to touch. The augmentation ends at the finger and the brain never has to adapt that much at all. The hearing implants are a different story altogether because hearing is already fully developed in the newborn's brains [1]. So if you have hearing issues due to biomechanical problems in your ear, the brain wouldn't need to adapt at all when these issues are removed. You would merely form new memories from new sounds but the sensory processing works normally from second zero onward. And if hearing is impaired due to neurological issues then I severely doubt any current implant technology would change that. That would need to be much closer to treating a stroke patient. The human brain is extremely adaptable, yes. Much more so in young people than in old. And apparently there is some variance with brain region (responsibility) as well. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1061088/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1061088/