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All right. Hello, everyone. So our next speaker is working at Body Hacks, the body hacking

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convention. And his focus is to introduce hackers to the concept of sensory augmentation, basic

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science behind our senses, and neuroplasticity. So here to present his talk, Hack Your Senses,

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Sensory Augmentation and Neuroplasticity, ladies and gentlemen, Trevor Goodman.

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Wee!

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There you go.

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Thanks.

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All right. So like he said, this is Sensory Augmentation 101, I think, on the schedule,

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or I renamed it at the last second.

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And definitely.

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Hack Your Senses, Sensory Augmentation and Brain Plasticity.

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I'm Trevor Goodman.

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I'm the events director for Body Hacks, the body hacking convention in Austin, Texas.

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If you want to ask questions afterwards or anything else, the QA mic's great.

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But if you forget that, this is me on Twitter, at Bello Osa.

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Let me put my notes back up.

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Don't mumble to yourself when you have a microphone on.

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So body hacking is about using and applying techniques and technology to make your brain

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and body better, and this includes technology and techniques that are old as well as ones

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that are new.

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So you'll see both referenced here, but today I'll be focusing on hacking your senses specifically,

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because your senses are the only mediator between your mind and the outside world, so

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that includes your body.

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So I believe sensory augmentation has the most potential for helping us really understand

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our environment.

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But what is sensory augmentation?

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This is Neil Harbison here on the right.

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For those of you who don't know him, Neil was born monochromatic, so he's completely

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colorblind.

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He sees in black and white.

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But while he was at university, he worked with an engineer to develop this antenna that

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is osseointegrated into his skull that lets him hear through bone conduction in a wider

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range of colors than you can see.

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So Neil's one of the most well-known people to have augmented senses, and is certainly

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one of the more dramatic cases.

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But there are likely people here at DEF CON who have magnets in their fingertips, or probably

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some people who have cochlear implants.

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So sensory augmentation is extending the body's ability to sense.

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The body's ability to sense aspects of the environment that are not normally perceivable

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by your natural state.

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So you're born, anything you do on top of that is sensory augmentation.

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For the most part, sensory augmentations currently rely on using sensory substitution,

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which is using one sense to replace another.

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We'll touch on a lot of sensory substitution as we go along, because the vast majority

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of sensory augmentation right now relies on that.

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Direct brain interfaces are being tested right now at DARPA, and DARPA-related re-net projects,

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including one at Case Western University, where they've linked a prosthetic to a sense

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of touch directly into a guy's brain.

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So if he's rummaging in a bag or picking up objects behind a curtain, he can have

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some sense of what he's doing, even though it's through a prosthetic.

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There's another related project through re-net, where DARPA has hooked a paraplegic woman

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up to a flight simulator directly through her brain, and she can fly the jet using her

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brain, but I'm not sure if they have the jet sensors feeding data into her brain, or if

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she was just using the monitor.

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But we're really close to getting into some of that space.

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Is this me?

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Is this it?

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Okay.

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All right.

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But how does that work?

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How can we essentially just plug electrical current into our brain and get our senses

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on the other end?

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Because that's crazy, right?

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So neuroplasticity.

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That's how that works.

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This is Paul Bakirida.

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His father had a stroke in the 50s, and when you had a stroke in the 50s, the doctor said,

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you're screwed, you'll never walk again, sorry.

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But his brother, George...

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George was a psychiatrist, and he felt like his dad could walk again, so he made him crawl,

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he made him go through all this really intense, horrible physical therapy for the time.

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And all his doctors said, you're crazy, you'll never walk again, this is stupid, why are

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you doing this?

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But eventually, he did walk again, and now we know that's what we do with stroke patients.

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We make them go through really horrific physical therapy until they can relearn to walk again.

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And after his father's death, they did an autopsy and found that the stroke-damaged

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areas of the brain were still there.

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So it's not like they're just gone.

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So it seemed like this was evidence for neuroplasticity, and that the brain had rerouted its connections

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around the damaged areas.

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And that's the wrong button.

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Paul Bakirida went on to study neuroplasticity by creating sensory substitution devices.

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One of those devices originally was built to teach a sense of balance to people who

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had lost it in injury.

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Eventually, it became the brain.

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The brain port, I think this is the original balance sensory substitution device, but it

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may also be an early version of the brain port.

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The brain port takes data from a camera.

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So what it does is it's intended to help blind people have a sense of their environment.

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So it takes data from a camera, it transmits that, or changes into a gray scale pixel grid,

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and then it takes that gray scale pixel grid and transmits it to an electrode matrix on

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your tongue.

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And so you wear, like, you have this little rubber thing with a bunch of little electrodes

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on it, and you stick it on there, and it vibrate.

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And it's very powerful.

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And it buzzes on your tongue in intensity based upon how dark or light the colors are.

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And with modern brain port and proper training, a new blind user can safely navigate a brand

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new environment in less than 10 hours of training.

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And so now we can see on brain scans that activity is registering in a visual cortex,

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even for people who don't have sight through their eyes.

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So Paul Bakirida always said, you see with your brain, not with your eyes.

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As Tim Cannon said first thing this morning, using these exact same words, you see with

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your brain, not with your eyes.

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These exact same words, which I thought was lovely.

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Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.

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That's mostly what it does.

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It takes in sensory data in the form of electrical signals through your eyes or your touch or

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any of your other senses, and then layers it on top of your expectations of your environment.

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So your brain supersedes your senses.

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So you see with your brain, not your eyes.

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But your senses feed back into that and develop predictions and expectations of your environment

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over time.

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So you have this feedback loop, even though your brain tops down your senses.

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And we know your brain tops down your senses.

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Because of stuff like optical and auditory illusions, your brain is trying to figure

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out and guess what's happening here as your eyes are confused.

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So we know we can augment our senses.

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But why would you do that?

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So this is my snail friend.

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If you were a garden snail, you'd be able to taste and you could smell.

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And you'd be able to feel your body balanced over a leaf.

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We also know that snails can traverse over the sharp edge of a knife blade without cutting

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themselves.

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So they have some sense of body position.

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And your little, cute, cup-shaped eyes would be able to tell the difference between light

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and dark.

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And you could see things a few inches away.

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But the snail's sensory bubble is pretty small.

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The part of the world it can know and can understand is tiny.

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As most of you are human, we've got a wider array of senses than that.

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They're commonly broken up in five.

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But it's really easy to identify more than that.

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Hearing is an obvious one.

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Smell and taste go together.

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Vision is, we just call it one sense, but it's also light and color and edge detection

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and motion.

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So there's lots of other things that fall under your visual sense.

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Touch comes into pressure and pain and cold and heat.

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All of those get lumped in there.

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All of those are your somatic senses.

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And then you've got a whole host of inter-receptive sensors for things like blood pressure, lung

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inflation and hunger.

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And balance and joint position go into those things, too.

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So if you don't...

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If you don't understand what all of these are, for instance, we'll talk about joint

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perception.

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It's one of my favorite things that you don't think that you have it as a sense.

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But if you close your eyes and move your arms around and you stop and you think about

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where your arms are in space, then you know where those are.

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So you have some sense of your body position that's separate than anything else.

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Loss of proprioception, which is the position thing, that's what we call it, it's a stupid

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name.

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We should just say position.

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It's a rare disorder.

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But it can cause lack of cordiality.

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It can cause lack of coordination and eventually complete lack of awareness of the body.

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So it makes you feel disembodied as if, like, you weren't really in your body.

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And this is also what the police test when they think that you're drunk and they're

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making you touch your nose or walk a narrow line.

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All of these things together are what we call perception.

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German philosophers would call this your umwelt, but we'll stick with sensory bubble.

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I think it makes a little more sense for most people.

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You're probably pretty happy with these amazing human senses that you've got.

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Instead of the snail senses.

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But there are a lot of things other animals can perceive that you can't.

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So the visual range, let's just talk back about sight, because we're mostly sight-oriented.

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The visual range that we see is a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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That includes everything from gamma rays and x-rays on one side to AM, FM, and microwaves

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and cellular on the other end.

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So imagine for a moment all the different types of radio signals moving through this

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room.

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And you just can't see it.

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You don't process them.

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They're here.

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You can pull out a tool to do that, but you can't understand it.

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But if you look just outside of our visual ability, you'll find ultraviolet and infrared

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in a lot of animals already.

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So bats will do echolocation.

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Snakes can see infrared, but it's a molecular sense.

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It's actually not visual-based.

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So it's a chemical thing.

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And then bees can also see in ultraviolet.

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Also Neil Harbison can see in ultraviolet, infrared.

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All right.

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So it's not outside of what we can do.

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Additionally, even if you just want to look at color, there are a lot of other animals

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that have different color cones, more color cones than we have, and who can differentiate

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between different wavelengths better than we can.

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So like, oh, we'll talk more about that in a second.

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Catfish are fun.

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They've got about 250 times as many taste receptors as you do, and they're all over

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their skin.

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So they taste their environment as they swim through it.

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And that is an entirely different sensory experience of their world than we have.

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Imagine tasting as you walk through DEF CON.

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For dogs, this is a good dog.

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He's also wearing AR glasses.

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And they, I mean, he's already augmenting his senses.

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I mean, it depends on what software he's running.

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But they possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors, which is compared to 6 million

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in us.

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So.

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As we are visual, we understand our environment visually.

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Dogs understand their environment through their smell for the most part.

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So you can blind a dog and it really doesn't lose as much of its understanding of its environment

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as we do.

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But it's seeing chemical trails pass through its environment all the time.

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But we don't stop with sensors inspired by other animals.

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We can build senses that let you sense the ozone level in your area.

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Moon Rebus has an implant in her elbow.

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That lets her feel earthquakes as they happen all over the world.

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You could build something that lets you know the amount of email in your inbox or stock

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prices or sense other cyborgs walking down the hall.

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Personally, I've got a horrible sense of direction.

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So I've always been interested in stuff like the bees and a lot of birds have a magnetic

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north sense.

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Oh, before we go anywhere, Narwhal is really cool.

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We skipped over this.

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But so this is actually a tooth.

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It's not a horn.

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It's a horn.

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And that tooth senses salinity and temperature and water pressure.

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And so like they're sensing a lot of stuff about the salinity is really cool because

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they breathe air.

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So when they're able to sense it's something about when the when the water freezes on the

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top of the ocean, the salinity changes.

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And so they can tell when the ice is frozen above them or not.

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So if they need to get up for water, they know where they can air.

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They know where to do that.

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So here's a fun example.

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This is a compass.

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You'll probably know what those are.

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You hold it in your hand and it tells you where magnetic north is.

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This on here on the right is North Sense.

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It was designed by a company called Cyborg Nest.

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They released it about six months ago.

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Their mission is to create new senses.

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On the board of that project is Neil Harbison.

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Also they've got some body modification experts in there as well.

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So this is a nice example.

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Steve Hayworth.

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00:12:42,520 --> 00:12:43,060
That's who it was.

243
00:12:43,400 --> 00:12:45,040
Steve Hayworth is also on this project.

244
00:12:46,120 --> 00:12:51,300
So at face value, oh, sorry, Cyborg Nest's mission is to create new senses for humans.

245
00:12:52,080 --> 00:12:53,640
And it's pierced on your chest.

246
00:12:53,780 --> 00:12:54,740
So it sits right here.

247
00:12:54,840 --> 00:12:57,400
And it's I think it's about one centimeter by two centimeters.

248
00:12:57,900 --> 00:12:59,340
And it vibrates when you face north.

249
00:13:00,120 --> 00:13:02,480
So at face value, both of those are really similar.

250
00:13:02,640 --> 00:13:03,360
You're like, why?

251
00:13:03,440 --> 00:13:04,360
Why would I do this?

252
00:13:04,380 --> 00:13:06,660
Why would I put this thing on my chest when I can just use a compass?

253
00:13:07,100 --> 00:13:10,440
But the compass is a tool that relies on your constant focus and attention.

254
00:13:11,340 --> 00:13:11,820
And that's why it's called a compass.

255
00:13:11,820 --> 00:13:15,020
And north sense is designed to be worn and felt all day every day.

256
00:13:15,320 --> 00:13:16,720
It's designed to be slept in it.

257
00:13:17,060 --> 00:13:20,220
And so over time, these become part of your experience.

258
00:13:20,440 --> 00:13:24,320
And it blends into the background like the hum of the AC or things happening in your

259
00:13:24,320 --> 00:13:24,920
peripheral vision.

260
00:13:25,440 --> 00:13:30,400
So it starts to sound a lot more like how your senses work than how compasses work.

261
00:13:31,340 --> 00:13:35,980
Because a lot of the things that you're processing with your senses are processed in your unconsciousness.

262
00:13:36,060 --> 00:13:39,800
And until something pops out and stands out, that's unusual.

263
00:13:39,980 --> 00:13:40,560
So if it went bah!

264
00:13:40,560 --> 00:13:41,880
Now everybody's paying attention.

265
00:13:42,540 --> 00:13:45,360
But if somebody made a noise in the back, you might not even notice.

266
00:13:47,580 --> 00:13:48,820
So here's the thing about the brain.

267
00:13:50,280 --> 00:13:52,600
The thing it does best, again, is to see patterns in data.

268
00:13:53,100 --> 00:13:58,180
And so when you put that sensory data on your chest every day, and it creates a predictable

269
00:13:58,180 --> 00:14:01,680
pattern in your environment, so every time you face north, it buzzes and tells you that,

270
00:14:02,320 --> 00:14:05,000
you start to feel and dream and think in north.

271
00:14:05,620 --> 00:14:09,860
You have attachments of memories relating to where they were facing.

272
00:14:09,980 --> 00:14:10,540
What direction?

273
00:14:10,560 --> 00:14:11,580
What direction they were facing on the planet.

274
00:14:13,100 --> 00:14:17,520
And NorthSense has actually got enough users, finally, that they're starting to work with

275
00:14:17,520 --> 00:14:21,160
I don't remember the university, but there's a university study with NorthSense users that

276
00:14:21,160 --> 00:14:22,680
are doing an N of about 150.

277
00:14:23,040 --> 00:14:26,520
So they're going to get some decent data, and they're going to be able to see how people

278
00:14:26,520 --> 00:14:31,860
are processing this and what it's doing to the way that they interact with their environment.

279
00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:35,380
So again, I argue there's a huge difference between these two things.

280
00:14:35,660 --> 00:14:39,100
This is the big argument on the internet whenever somebody talks about NorthSense.

281
00:14:39,200 --> 00:14:40,260
Well, I'll just get a compass.

282
00:14:41,780 --> 00:14:45,140
Other big projects in this space that I think are important and really help do this, this

283
00:14:45,140 --> 00:14:46,660
is NeoSensory's vest.

284
00:14:46,900 --> 00:14:48,020
This is one of my favorites.

285
00:14:49,700 --> 00:14:55,880
It has vibrator motors attached to the side here, and the vibrator motors translate sound

286
00:14:55,880 --> 00:15:00,900
waves into tactile feedback that are intended to give people who are deaf a way to process

287
00:15:00,900 --> 00:15:01,200
sound.

288
00:15:01,480 --> 00:15:04,820
So if you're wearing the vest and I say, technology, it will go .

289
00:15:05,740 --> 00:15:08,860
And if somebody else says technology, it will take those same sound waves and it will go

290
00:15:08,860 --> 00:15:09,340
.

291
00:15:10,800 --> 00:15:15,260
So it's not taking the words and then converting it into tactile feedback.

292
00:15:15,420 --> 00:15:16,620
It's converting the sound waves themselves.

293
00:15:18,840 --> 00:15:20,220
And this is at the wormhole.

294
00:15:20,500 --> 00:15:21,900
So we're playing with it here.

295
00:15:22,060 --> 00:15:23,980
And you can see it light up as it vibrates the music.

296
00:15:24,600 --> 00:15:29,280
But the applications don't necessarily stop with playing at dance parties and helping

297
00:15:29,280 --> 00:15:29,860
deaf people hear.

298
00:15:30,540 --> 00:15:37,560
The vest can be set up to translate stock data into feelings so you can feel the dow

299
00:15:37,560 --> 00:15:39,100
fall and plummet all day long.

300
00:15:39,280 --> 00:15:39,320
.

301
00:15:40,360 --> 00:15:43,020
Or to feel the pitch and roll and yaw of a drone.

302
00:15:43,200 --> 00:15:46,460
So if you're wearing a VR headset and you're wearing a vest and you're flying a drone,

303
00:15:46,600 --> 00:15:49,680
you're going to have a much more I'm in the drone experience than you're going to have

304
00:15:49,680 --> 00:15:53,160
I'm sitting here watching it on the ground with a thing.

305
00:15:54,580 --> 00:15:56,800
In the middle, this is an AR helmet.

306
00:15:56,960 --> 00:16:01,820
I don't actually consider this sensory augmentation, but I think it's an important example.

307
00:16:03,060 --> 00:16:05,780
This gives a heads-up display to the motorcycle riders.

308
00:16:06,600 --> 00:16:09,220
And it's definitely more wearable tech.

309
00:16:09,220 --> 00:16:17,440
But as some of this stuff gets better, you can certainly see how if you took this augmented

310
00:16:17,440 --> 00:16:21,800
reality and you applied it to your vision constantly, how it would become a part of

311
00:16:21,800 --> 00:16:23,420
your subconscious reaction to your environment.

312
00:16:25,340 --> 00:16:28,820
This on the right side is Daniel Kish.

313
00:16:29,020 --> 00:16:30,680
So you don't even need really cool technology.

314
00:16:32,600 --> 00:16:36,420
He takes groups of blind people out in the wilderness and trains them to use their hearing

315
00:16:36,420 --> 00:16:39,200
to echo-lacate using clicks or cane-tips.

316
00:16:39,200 --> 00:16:44,800
And there are other projects that are using gene therapy to add red-green cones to people

317
00:16:44,800 --> 00:16:45,480
with color deficiency.

318
00:16:46,080 --> 00:16:47,880
It works in chimpanzees.

319
00:16:48,420 --> 00:16:52,640
And others working on making people tetrachromat, so having a yellow cone.

320
00:16:53,300 --> 00:16:54,280
But this is DEF CON.

321
00:16:54,380 --> 00:16:55,680
So if you can't do it yourself, why do you care?

322
00:16:56,600 --> 00:16:57,720
So here's some examples.

323
00:16:58,020 --> 00:17:02,440
This real quick is, I think it's a Northpaw or Southpaw.

324
00:17:03,240 --> 00:17:06,460
This is a variant of another North sensing device.

325
00:17:07,280 --> 00:17:09,180
They built this based upon a. . .

326
00:17:09,180 --> 00:17:13,560
Project at a university where they had built a belt with vibrator motors all around it

327
00:17:13,560 --> 00:17:15,540
and it would vibrate where North was all the time.

328
00:17:16,400 --> 00:17:21,720
They saw similar results in their stuff as North senses seeing.

329
00:17:21,880 --> 00:17:22,720
This is the same thing.

330
00:17:22,760 --> 00:17:26,580
It's on a smaller scale, so it's like a little prison bracelet on your ankle that vibrates.

331
00:17:27,460 --> 00:17:30,380
We've already talked about magnets a lot today, so we'll not do too much of that.

332
00:17:30,500 --> 00:17:36,080
But there are a lot of other projects, Bottlenose for instance, that is supposed to go over

333
00:17:36,080 --> 00:17:37,580
that and help you see this.

334
00:17:38,500 --> 00:17:41,140
Haptic sense, haptic stuff is really interesting.

335
00:17:41,340 --> 00:17:43,020
This is, again, another way you can do ultrasound.

336
00:17:43,300 --> 00:17:46,320
This is an Arduino project on Instructables.

337
00:17:48,960 --> 00:17:52,520
This here is the voice, so there are a couple different apps even.

338
00:17:52,620 --> 00:17:54,640
This is a different visual program.

339
00:17:54,900 --> 00:17:58,500
This is like the brain port, but instead of translating it into an electrode grid, what

340
00:17:58,500 --> 00:18:04,880
it does is it scans vertically every half a second or second and it gives you an audio

341
00:18:04,880 --> 00:18:06,460
signal of what's in front of you.

342
00:18:07,580 --> 00:18:08,380
That's an Android app.

343
00:18:09,100 --> 00:18:10,100
It's also for iPhone.

344
00:18:10,360 --> 00:18:11,180
It's also for Windows.

345
00:18:11,460 --> 00:18:12,320
You can turn it on.

346
00:18:12,580 --> 00:18:13,660
It's the voice for Android.

347
00:18:13,780 --> 00:18:16,260
You can download it and start playing with it right away.

348
00:18:16,340 --> 00:18:17,400
I've got it on my phone if you want to see it.

349
00:18:18,640 --> 00:18:22,620
These are all projects from somebody that is really awesome.

350
00:18:22,760 --> 00:18:26,120
She does a lot of research in this space, so she has a lot of really fun projects.

351
00:18:26,400 --> 00:18:27,240
Her name is Ison.

352
00:18:28,580 --> 00:18:29,900
This is kind of like the brain port.

353
00:18:30,020 --> 00:18:32,020
This is her version of trying to recreate the brain port.

354
00:18:32,100 --> 00:18:34,000
This has a much lower resolution than the brain port does.

355
00:18:34,700 --> 00:18:35,820
She's also done an ultrasound.

356
00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:37,180
That was intended for...

357
00:18:37,180 --> 00:18:37,840
For being underwater.

358
00:18:38,480 --> 00:18:40,340
This is another echolocation project.

359
00:18:40,540 --> 00:18:45,900
She found that if you blind people, they actually start to use their visual cortex really quickly

360
00:18:45,900 --> 00:18:47,800
and adapt to it a lot more quickly.

361
00:18:48,380 --> 00:18:53,020
This is a watch that gives you different smells depending on the time of day, so you can get

362
00:18:53,020 --> 00:18:55,480
a time sense that's substituted with your smell.

363
00:18:56,020 --> 00:19:02,040
And then this is a bone conduction headset that she calls the Play-A-Grill that has an

364
00:19:02,040 --> 00:19:05,240
MP3 player that plays through your teeth and then through your jaw.

365
00:19:06,280 --> 00:19:06,720
Okay.

366
00:19:06,720 --> 00:19:08,620
Where was the other thing I was going to say?

367
00:19:09,340 --> 00:19:12,040
I have another cool thing you need to hear about, and I forgot it.

368
00:19:13,380 --> 00:19:13,940
Oh, yeah.

369
00:19:14,060 --> 00:19:17,900
So there are a lot of different groups that are putting some of these different projects

370
00:19:17,900 --> 00:19:18,220
together.

371
00:19:19,200 --> 00:19:21,020
There's Hack the Senses in Budapest.

372
00:19:21,400 --> 00:19:25,880
There was also recently Cyborg Futures at Parsons, where they're putting together workshops

373
00:19:25,880 --> 00:19:27,860
to help people design and build new senses.

374
00:19:28,200 --> 00:19:32,460
I'm hoping to see some more stuff like this at Grindfest soon, but I hear they're mostly

375
00:19:32,460 --> 00:19:33,680
interested in shocking each other.

376
00:19:34,860 --> 00:19:36,660
And with open source hardware...

377
00:19:36,660 --> 00:19:36,700
Oh, where was the other thing I was going to say?

378
00:19:36,720 --> 00:19:40,680
Like, there's a company called Bitolino and OpenBCI.

379
00:19:40,840 --> 00:19:42,280
Both of those do different biosignals.

380
00:19:42,500 --> 00:19:47,500
And the basic stuff you can get at Adafruit and SparkFun, you can do a lot of fun sensory

381
00:19:47,500 --> 00:19:48,700
stuff right now.

382
00:19:50,020 --> 00:19:54,620
So if you want to hear more about this and related stuff, here's my stupid pitch that

383
00:19:54,620 --> 00:19:55,080
everybody hates.

384
00:19:55,340 --> 00:19:58,200
Come to Body Hacks, first weekend of February, Austin, Texas.

385
00:19:58,440 --> 00:19:59,400
Here's how to reach us.

386
00:19:59,700 --> 00:20:00,300
Here's me.

387
00:20:00,360 --> 00:20:00,980
There's my thing.

388
00:20:01,040 --> 00:20:01,360
Questions?

389
00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:04,220
I got like two minutes, right?

390
00:20:05,140 --> 00:20:05,700
More than...

391
00:20:05,700 --> 00:20:05,920
All right.

392
00:20:05,920 --> 00:20:06,040
Cool.

393
00:20:07,600 --> 00:20:09,300
Who wants to be hit with a squishy brain?

394
00:20:16,740 --> 00:20:17,180
Cool.

395
00:20:17,720 --> 00:20:18,460
Any questions?

396
00:20:19,060 --> 00:20:19,500
Questions?

397
00:20:22,800 --> 00:20:23,240
Nope.

398
00:20:23,940 --> 00:20:24,380
Cool.

399
00:20:25,740 --> 00:20:26,180
Yeah.

400
00:20:26,200 --> 00:20:28,140
You can ask me here if you want to talk about it later.

401
00:20:28,640 --> 00:20:29,080
Oh.

402
00:20:29,220 --> 00:20:29,780
Go ahead.

403
00:20:31,560 --> 00:20:32,000
Okay.

404
00:20:33,020 --> 00:20:33,460
Thanks.

405
00:20:34,140 --> 00:20:35,900
So you had about 20,000 subscribers.

406
00:20:35,920 --> 00:20:40,280
And you have 20 or so human senses listed, which is different from the five senses.

407
00:20:40,400 --> 00:20:40,640
Yes.

408
00:20:41,300 --> 00:20:45,120
Which one does the fifth sense sound fall under?

409
00:20:45,180 --> 00:20:45,900
Is it pressure?

410
00:20:47,160 --> 00:20:47,600
Sound?

411
00:20:47,840 --> 00:20:48,180
Yes.

412
00:20:48,260 --> 00:20:49,420
Sound is its own thing.

413
00:20:49,480 --> 00:20:55,300
It comes in compression of air pressure waves into your ear.

414
00:20:55,460 --> 00:20:56,080
So it's...

415
00:20:56,080 --> 00:20:57,280
So it's totally its own thing.

416
00:20:58,360 --> 00:20:59,760
So it's a type of pressure.

417
00:21:00,120 --> 00:21:01,940
I guess it's a type of pressure reception.

418
00:21:02,280 --> 00:21:05,240
I'm a lay expert in this stuff so that may be over my head.

419
00:21:05,400 --> 00:21:05,760
All right.

420
00:21:05,780 --> 00:21:05,900
Thanks for having me.

421
00:21:05,900 --> 00:21:09,220
Yeah, I mean, it bounces off your eardrum.

422
00:21:09,380 --> 00:21:09,880
Thank you.

423
00:21:10,060 --> 00:21:10,360
No worries.

424
00:21:11,260 --> 00:21:15,180
So for the RFID chips, I know that there is documentation out there

425
00:21:15,180 --> 00:21:19,260
that you give to a piercer or a body modification expert,

426
00:21:19,380 --> 00:21:21,320
and they are pretty easily able to do it.

427
00:21:21,360 --> 00:21:25,900
Do you know if the NorthSense is the same, or is that a lot more difficult?

428
00:21:27,680 --> 00:21:29,120
So this is funny, actually.

429
00:21:29,220 --> 00:21:31,460
I was reading some stuff on it this morning.

430
00:21:31,800 --> 00:21:34,640
There is a lot of disagreement about whether the NorthSense,

431
00:21:34,640 --> 00:21:37,560
and it's mostly in whether it's a good place on the chest or not,

432
00:21:37,660 --> 00:21:41,540
because a lot of piercers will say, hey, it's pierced on transdermals.

433
00:21:42,760 --> 00:21:45,920
So they were using the round ones, but they've moved to flat transdermals,

434
00:21:45,960 --> 00:21:48,020
and NorthSense says that they think that those are better,

435
00:21:48,140 --> 00:21:50,560
and they haven't had any issues in the people who they've been testing with.

436
00:21:50,860 --> 00:21:54,200
But people like Sampa Von Cyborg are like, hey, well, let's just wait and see.

437
00:21:54,420 --> 00:21:57,680
So part of this study of 150 people is, I think,

438
00:21:57,680 --> 00:22:00,120
hoping to figure out whether it's an actual good test location.

439
00:22:00,460 --> 00:22:02,000
And I'm really excited about this stuff,

440
00:22:02,100 --> 00:22:04,320
but I'm super worried about knocking all that and hitting it

441
00:22:04,320 --> 00:22:05,100
and having them come off.

442
00:22:05,880 --> 00:22:09,100
So personally, I don't think that's a good location for me for that,

443
00:22:09,680 --> 00:22:11,720
but a lot of people are trying it, and we'll have to see.

444
00:22:13,660 --> 00:22:15,380
Are they going to place it on, like, a back?

445
00:22:15,560 --> 00:22:16,560
Has anyone tried anything else?

446
00:22:16,840 --> 00:22:20,820
I don't know for sure where other locations have been posted.

447
00:22:20,900 --> 00:22:22,700
I know there's a guy, Russ Fox,

448
00:22:22,860 --> 00:22:24,520
who I think has placed them in a couple other places,

449
00:22:24,720 --> 00:22:25,820
but I don't know specifically.

450
00:22:26,520 --> 00:22:26,980
Thank you.

451
00:22:27,020 --> 00:22:29,840
I know those flat transdermals are a lot better for piercers.

452
00:22:29,900 --> 00:22:31,860
Yeah, well, that's what they're saying, too, but we'll see if it works.

453
00:22:33,300 --> 00:22:33,780
All right.

454
00:22:34,320 --> 00:22:36,200
So how do you explain all this to your doctor?

455
00:22:36,600 --> 00:22:38,160
How do I explain?

456
00:22:38,300 --> 00:22:40,940
I mean, I'm lucky enough to not really get sick.

457
00:22:42,500 --> 00:22:44,840
But, like, what questions would your doctor have?

458
00:22:47,080 --> 00:22:47,880
For example...

459
00:22:47,880 --> 00:22:48,960
You be the doctor, I'll be you.

460
00:22:49,260 --> 00:22:49,600
All right.

461
00:22:52,480 --> 00:22:58,140
So why did you decide to pin this magnetic north sensor to your test?

462
00:22:58,140 --> 00:22:58,880
Oh, well, okay.

463
00:22:59,200 --> 00:23:03,340
In that kind of case, I like to ask that with another question.

464
00:23:03,420 --> 00:23:04,100
It's like, okay, well,

465
00:23:04,320 --> 00:23:08,940
if you could sense more of your environment around you,

466
00:23:08,980 --> 00:23:09,800
why would you not want to?

467
00:23:10,520 --> 00:23:11,040
All right.

468
00:23:11,840 --> 00:23:12,540
Second question.

469
00:23:12,940 --> 00:23:13,940
You need an MRI.

470
00:23:14,520 --> 00:23:15,920
Do you have any magnets on you?

471
00:23:16,120 --> 00:23:16,480
Yeah.

472
00:23:16,560 --> 00:23:17,560
Do you have them in your fingertips?

473
00:23:17,760 --> 00:23:20,920
Yeah, well, I mean, so the fingertip magnets, I think,

474
00:23:20,920 --> 00:23:23,340
it was funny, we actually talked about this at the Q&A for the last talk.

475
00:23:24,060 --> 00:23:28,120
There's a lot of argument about whether it actually causes issue with MRIs or not.

476
00:23:28,800 --> 00:23:33,760
I don't have any personal experience, but with, I mean, the north sense,

477
00:23:33,760 --> 00:23:36,900
you could unscrew the balls and pull the thing off if you wanted to for an MRI,

478
00:23:37,060 --> 00:23:38,600
and hopefully you're not getting MRI every week.

479
00:23:39,760 --> 00:23:42,540
And, I mean, most people probably don't get them every year.

480
00:23:42,880 --> 00:23:46,000
So I think for those kind of things, those are niche issues,

481
00:23:46,220 --> 00:23:47,680
which we have issues with any technology.

482
00:23:47,880 --> 00:23:50,720
So I don't think it's any different than any other thing that we adopt.

483
00:23:50,940 --> 00:23:51,400
All right.

484
00:23:51,460 --> 00:23:51,600
We adopt.

485
00:23:53,180 --> 00:23:53,880
Last question.

486
00:23:54,620 --> 00:23:59,880
So a couple years ago, I saw a demonstration from Tachi Lab on YouTube.

487
00:23:59,960 --> 00:24:02,500
They had some texture-based stuff.

488
00:24:02,560 --> 00:24:03,320
They had a glove.

489
00:24:03,760 --> 00:24:07,660
With a little thing on the inside, and you would touch a touch screen,

490
00:24:07,800 --> 00:24:10,360
and you would feel the synthetic texture on.

491
00:24:10,660 --> 00:24:11,060
Nice.

492
00:24:11,080 --> 00:24:12,580
So they're doing a haptic thing with the.

493
00:24:12,680 --> 00:24:13,020
Right.

494
00:24:13,100 --> 00:24:17,080
So then you've got like Senseg, right, which is the, or Sense-G or whatever it is,

495
00:24:17,100 --> 00:24:19,700
where you have to drag your finger across it.

496
00:24:20,060 --> 00:24:22,620
So everything I could find, and they're all Japanese,

497
00:24:22,740 --> 00:24:25,420
so I tried emailing them, but they couldn't respond to me.

498
00:24:26,240 --> 00:24:30,000
Like, how do you get that fine-grained texture thing without the movement?

499
00:24:30,860 --> 00:24:33,380
I don't understand the science between a lot of that stuff.

500
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:36,580
And you're talking about projects that I actually haven't heard of.

501
00:24:36,880 --> 00:24:42,420
So we've had a lot of trouble reaching people in Asia for stuff like this until recently.

502
00:24:42,620 --> 00:24:44,260
And so a lot of that is just now starting to change.

503
00:24:44,380 --> 00:24:46,180
Those lines of communication are opening up.

504
00:24:46,620 --> 00:24:48,040
So I'm not familiar with those projects.

505
00:24:48,060 --> 00:24:51,140
So please tell me about them and give me links so I can go look at them.

506
00:24:51,400 --> 00:24:51,480
Okay.

507
00:24:54,640 --> 00:24:55,040
Cool.

508
00:24:56,400 --> 00:24:59,480
Yeah, my background is in running events and psychology, so.