Livewired Brain #4: Sensory Enhancement, Sensory Addition
In an earlier blog , we looked at sensory substitution capabilities of the brain. In Livewired , David Eagleman next looks at the brain’s capability to deal with sensory enhancement , even addition of entirely new senses. He cites the case of a lady who lost her sense of balance (due to an inner ear problem). So a helmet that read the tilt of her head was placed on her head that would send tilt/balance signals via her tongue (her ear channel wasn’t working, remember?), and voila! Her brain learnt to “understand the strangely routed information” and her ability to balance improved tremendously. In another instance, a color blind artist attached a device that converted color to sound signals delivered via “bone conduction behind his ear”. Now he can “see” and differentiate colors. Even better, he can see colors beyond the normal spectrum that us regular mortals can see, because the range of his color detection sensors are better than our eyes! Impressive...