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Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, I want this in my retinas, along with the sixteen mantis shrimp photoreceptors. And dog ears.

On the other hand, I have enough sensory overload as is, without tasting the EM field.

That is a good one, I wonder how our brains would manage it.

Probably similar to how we already deal with it - shutting down, having a meltdown, seeking sensory isolation, etc. I mean most people already do this, by e.g. putting in some earbuds and looking at your phone / newspaper / middle distance while in public transit.

For a demo version drop some acid. :)

Brains are incredibly adaptive. There are tons of experiences where people have had diminished or lost access to one of the senses and recovered surprisingly well.

I had a colleague once who had a stroke and described his vision afterwards as looking though splintered glass. After a while, he explained he didn’t perceive it anymore and that his brain just decided to “workaround” the issue making new connections where needed.

I think having some “sense” of magnetic fields could be very subtle, like just a feeling of which direction you’re facing when you’re turning around (you could argue you already use the position of the sun this way, subconsciously).

People into body mods who get a magnetic implant often describe it as a sixth sense [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_implant

https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/ocular-migraine.ht...

Ocular migraines will give the splintered glass effect. They are temporary however.

We can ask Grimes when she walks too close to an Ikea lamp.

Visible light is also EM radiation, so I say you're good with it!

One of the key functions of the mind is which aspects of input to pay attention to and which not to. So I wonder what sensory overload is. You can get sensory overload if there's environmental overload. But otherwise it's like the mind can't discriminate well enough.

Oddly, the shrimp themselves are not great at color discrimination.

Hanne Theon and colleagues trained mantis shrimp to attack squares of certain colors to get food rewards. Attacks on other “distractor” squares weren’t rewarded. By varying the color of those distractors, one can measure the spectral sensitivity of their visual system. Using similar methods, humans can distinguish between wavelengths a few nm apart; mantis shrimp are more like 20 nm.

This is disappointing, but the reason is pretty wild. Most animals have “color opponency”: circuits early in the visual system convert the photoreceptors’ output into a differential representation: the intensity of red light here minus the intensity of green light in the surrounding neighborhood. This mechanism “normalizes” for the total amount of light, thereby letting you separately perceive hue and brightness, and has some other nice properties.

Mantis Shrimp took a different path. There’s no obvious inhibitory interaction between the photoreceptors. They may therefore separately perceive redness, greenness, blueness, etc, but without combining these streams of information, their color acuity is poor. Interestingly, they do a “scanning” behavior that sort of recreates the opponency by dragging different types of photoreceptors across the same part of the visual world.

Thoen, H. H., How, M. J., Chiou, T. H., & Marshall, J. (2014). A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp. Science, 343(6169), 411–413. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1126/science.1245824

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tsyr-Huei-Chiou/publica...

I have a feeling most of our cities would be unhabitable if we had dog ears.

And 44kHz CD quality would sound like crap.

If we suddenly got it, yes. Otherwise we would design cities not to bother us. Also, dogs do live in large numbers even in our present cities and have longer lifespans than they do in the wild.

All that, but the dog ears. I can hear neighbor's loud TV very well already :-)

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