Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I think what you did is rolled back a layer of abstraction your brain created for you. Sure, your eyeballs are high-sampling-frequency tongues swimming in a sea of light. But the brain processes those raw sensory readings, fuses them with a bunch of other things, and presents it as a view of the world, and then to simplify things, it tells itself that this is the world.

I'm actually super-interested in ways of building those layers of abstractions. Consider tool use. If you've used any tool a lot, you know the feeling of it becoming an extension of yourself. Proficient drivers don't think about moving the keyboard or turning the wheels, they just sort of are the car and will themselves to move where they want to go. As I type this comment, I don't think about my fingers pounding on the keyboard, I just will the words to appear on screen. The brain is good at papering over the mechanics of interacting with the world, and I think it's entirely feasible to start incorporating new senses if our devices can be designed around this purpose, instead of relying on explicitly displaying data for our eyes.

This is very interesting.

I remember reading about pilots placing an electrode on the tongue and eventually learning to intuitively feel what the external sensor was telling them.

Or another one about a person wearing a belt which always vibrated in the spot facing north. This helped them navigate cities more efficiently after getting accustomed to the vibrations.

Do you have other examples?

Anecdotally, I participated, as a non-blind control, to a study assessing cross-modal perception in blind folks (how they use their visual cortex to analyze haptic stimuli).

The meat of the experience was evaluating the performance of pattern recognition on an array of electrode placed on the tongue.

Before and after training, all subjects underwent evoked potential recordings of their tongue (recodring the EEG following electric stimuly on the tongue).

Being aware of the protocol in advance, during the "before" evoked potential session, I concentrated on my mouth, visualizing it as a place I was sitting in.

I ended up experiencing blue phosphenes (light flashes) sinc'ed with the electric pulses, and my visual cortex was lighting up along with my sensory cortex. That was my first and only proper synesthetic experience (I used to associate vowels and colors as a kid, each vowel clearly mapped to a color, but it was conceptual, not perceptual).

Since I was an outlier (similar evoked potentials were only seen in blind subjects after training), I was excluded from the rest of the study, so I could not experience the complex patterns on the "tongue display unit".

https://www.sciencesquared.eu/sites/default/files/toungue_di...

This is discussed in the book Incognito by David Eagleman. I remember reading about someone learning to "see" with their tongue. Along the same line, his team developed a vest which translates information into vibration patterns on the torso: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-this-futuris...

> Or another one about a person wearing a belt which always vibrated in the spot facing north. This helped them navigate cities more efficiently after getting accustomed to the vibrations.

IIRC, the participants also felt incredibly lost after they had to give back the belt

This is a strong area of personal interest for me. I think BCI will eventually begin to incorporate those ideas of turning external stimuli such as haptics into representations of data our brain can understand.

ML is popular because it’s a set of learning algorithms that we can feed numeric data and output some learned prediction. Once we learn how to feed this numeric data to the brain (similar to the tongue sensor or a haptic vest), then we have the most efficient learning algorithm consuming and making sense of this data!!

That's so cool, I'd love a wifi belt so that I could sense (all or specific) people coming...

Those were the exact two I have on my mind. I've actually started building an ankle bracelet for the north-sense to test it out on myself.

People also reported getting a feel for strong EM fields in their surroundings after implanting a small magnet in a finger.

You might have come across this, or similar, images before (random image search link, no affiliation):

https://www.themystica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Homunc...

This is a proportional representation of touch-sense nerve density in the skin.

Trade-offs though hey. All the highest density areas are probably also the least convenient location for augmented-synesthesia touch-sense devices.

I'm pretty sure they missed one spot :)

Yes, I believe you’re right. That image is very G rated.

I'm very excited for BCI, more so than for virtual reality or augmented reality, if only because it'll eventually allow me to remove any physical barrier to interacting with a computer.

I suspect that, due to the abstraction process you've noted, that it won't be long until the computer is a direct extension of will. Once people start realizing this, I think society is going upend, and a small number of extremely high-output people are going to remake the world.

The Singularity is real, and I think simply obsoleting the mouse and keyboard is going to kick it off. We could even replace screens, but I see it as less of a factor.

It’s been a long time since typing speed felt like my limiting factor.

His position is less about speed and more about creation. If you didn’t have to shift cursor focus or “delete 3 chars and replace with these other 3 chars” would you represent things directly to the machine like you would to yourself, unbridled by the necessity to serialize these thoughts via the keyboard.

It may be the difference between “Refactor > Extract to parameter” and “Find all uses of function. Replace signature with modified signature, setting new parameter to value desired, using parameter from signature instead of local variable”.

When you are a child, you express yourself by constructing words of letters, then sentences of words. What if we’re at the sentence stage right now and the future is expressing ideas as paragraphs all at once.

That would be a shift akin to macros or HKT in programming languages.

That’s what he’s selling. Not the typing. The typing just hurts immersion a little bit.

I don't know if it's typing speed or not, but dictating a narrative and typing it feel completely different. I type at about 80-90wpm and probably speak at 150-180. That impedance mismatch is enough to block free-flowing thought and cause me to repeat/rewind sentences. I don't know if it's limiting, as the output of typing is usually less verbose, but it takes me longer to get it down.

It's not so much about typing speed for me, more about the physical act of sitting at a computer and coding. If I could think code into existence, then I can code literally anywhere. Laptops are way more portable than desktops, but not nearly portable enough.

I don't exactly agree with the Singularity guy but thinking that typing is the only way to interact with a computer (or network) is very narrow minded

This CCC presentation was an eye opener for me https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9370-hacking_how_we_see

> I think it's entirely feasible to start incorporating new senses if our devices can be designed around this purpose

The prototypical example of this is a magnet implanted in a finger which allows you to sense magnetic fields.

In other words, your data is only as good as your sensors.

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