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Comment by PlanetFunk | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. A while ago I read about a belt that enabled the wearer to know true north and was very interested in trying to develop something similar (maybe the size of a watch).

This implanting sounds kind of cool (in a cyber punk sort of way). Guess deep down there's a trans-human in me wanting to get out ;)

Not sure about the pain, loss of digits, infections, etc...

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Having an unflappable sense of direction/true north is not transhuman though. You just have to have been raised speaking any languages that uses geographic coordinates instead of the typical egocentric ones. Such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language#Gramma.... to form the required mental processes. If you dig deeper you find that although they also do also use relative coordinates, they are performing what sounds like crazy affine transformations when doing so.

"The apparently effortless conceptual operations required to employ these short and ubiquitous cardinal direction terms are complex, requiring not only a highly developed “sense of direction” (and memory for terrain, routes, landmarks, etc.), but a simultaneous merging or juggling of what appear to be separate frames of reference (in Levinson’s sense) embedded in even single lexical forms, which maintain the “absolute” orientation which is in principle independent of particular terrain or of any given reference point or orientation, with the “relative” calculation of origos and focus points, with the “intrinsic” geometries of natural landmarks and their orientations in space."

http://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Di...

Now that is truly fascinating, how would such a thing develop?

I'm neither a linguist nor a psychologist so I'm just going to chalk it up to how amazingly flexible the human brain is. I found out about that language from reading http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html.

But I've had a long interest in how language can have a measurable effect on what your default thought processes are, even if it doesn't limit what you can express. This also folds back some interesting perspectives into computer language debates and if the one you use actually makes a difference..

Yeah, there's an anklet that vibrates on the north side continuously. http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/ Eventually, your brain doesn't feel the vibrating anymore, you just "know" which way is north. Meredith Scheff mod'ed it into a skirt that lights up http://steampunkworkshop.com/north-skirt :-)

The anklet is fantastic. I wonder how many things of this type you could wear and integrate the information at once. For instance if you had the Northpaw and something on your other ankle that buzzed in the direction of the nearest wifi signal and a wrist band that vibrated according to some other measure, would you develop an "innate sense" of each of these things the people wearing the belt did, or would it be too much buzzing to handle? Cool stuff.

Your brain is already getting a staggering amount of information from various senses, and simply discards most of it. Over time, it just learns what's relevant and what isn't. You are not (normally) aware of the sensation of your shirt against your skin, but you can feel it if you want to. I suspect that processing these new inputs would rob neurons from processing other senses, but I doubt it would be overwhelming if you learned them one at a time.

"A while ago I read about a belt that enabled the wearer to know true north"

There's this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

and this:

http://www.monkeysandrobots.com/hapticcompass

Body mods have always sounded very cool, if they work properly. And what would happen if those EM-detecting discs were to rupture?

Unless I was blinded or loss of something, I'd not consider these mods. Now, if we're talking about a bionic eye that would fit after a mod, sign me up :)

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