Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpipers | Hacker News Reader

Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpipers

techxplore.com

> Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.

> These findings confirm that people can genuinely sense an object before physical contact

So, it’s just touch, relayed through grains of sand.

Less clickbaity title: Humans have 'remote' touch like sandpipers, research shows

Same sentiment. It’s still touch through a slightly less solid medium.

It's being presented as if it was a new sense instead of regular physical thouch. There is nothing remote about it.

The surprising part was that we can interpret slight differences in touch to locate something buried shallowly in sand, which is interesting enough without the clickbait.

or 'Human touch is sensitive to material dynamics', although that's getting into the realms of the abstract.

I don't think that's even a novel result. It's been known for a while that we can perceive nanoscale textures based on interference between the texture of the material and texture of your fingerprints when in motion

A bit linkbaity; it's not remote touch per se, but the ability to detect a buried object in sand by touch. The subjects couldn't touch the object directly but could feel where it was through the sand. Which doesn't seem weird or supernatural to me, the way the sand shifts etc will be affected by an object inside of it.

I possess an eighth sense which allows me to determine whether or not I have received an email by looking at my phone and seeing the notification for such. I don't even need to open the email app and I can sense that one has arrived.

Child's play.

Not only can I do the same, I can also sense the contents of my work email without reading it.

Very specifically, I can sense it's going to be related to jam packing LLMs into any and every @#$&ing thing we work on because AI.

This started with sand dousing and progressed into clairvoyance.

When you hold a pen in your hand and touch a piece of paper with the tip of the pen, you can "feel" the tip of the pen touching the paper even though what you actually feel is the change in pressure of the pen against your fingers.

What's really fun is - under "quiet" enough conditions - being able to kinda feel walls from up to maybe an inch or so away. Not sure if it's air currents or reflected body heat or sound waves or what, but there's something there.

That's like the fact that we can sense the difference between hot and cold water being poured into a cup

It seems a bit of a stretch to separate this from the ordinary sense of touch.

I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning.

Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess the size and other features of things by sound without seeing them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.

> I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning

That seems like a very strong claim against the paper’s results. What makes you think that the study participants located the cube with reasoning, rather than unthinking sense?

I think we can be too quick to write things off as somehow coming from conscious thought when they bypass that part of our minds entirely. I don’t form sentences with a rational use of grammar. I don’t determine how heavy something is by reasoning about its weight before I pick it up. There is something much more interesting happening cognitively in these cases that we shouldn’t dismiss.

'normal world modelling' doesn't imply conscious thought to me. Humans do a ton of stuff unconsciously e.g. 'gut instinct'.

exactly. Gp, I meant reasoning in the automatic sense, like how you reason about where a ball will land from afar as you go to catch it.

This is like wondering if we calculate parabolas consciously before catching a tossed ball. We had to learn its behavior without knowing the physics, but it becomes unconscious soon. If tossed balls behaved like they do in cartoons, we'd learn to predict them even if they violated the laws of physics.

I still wonder how we practiced finding things by distinguishing the fluidity of a medium around them. Maybe playing in water?

what is "unthinking sense?" we model the world subconsciously

Did I miss the memo? When did we get a sixth sense?

Proprioception (balance); it was always there tho afair

I've never read proprioception described as a sense of balance before. AFAIU, proprioception is the sense of where your body parts are in relation to each other--arms, legs, head, eyes (and eye gaze), and much more that's difficult to enumerate or describe. I guess that's critical to maintaining balance, but not sufficient? Summarizing proprioception as balance seems wrong even if the inner ear vestibular system (which is where our "sense" of balance is regulated, AFAIU) is a component of proprioception.

Vestibular system is probably a better term for the balance system.

And in addition to proprioception, we can sense hunger, thirst, tiredness, time, temperature, balance, our own movements, pain, pressure, and maybe even itching. It's just that "we have discovered a seventeenth sense" has less glamour to it

We have between 12 and 33. Counting to five or six is poetic, but not rooted in science.

Phasic, tonic and phasic-tonic senses is a cool deep dive.

This is fascinating work, thanks for sharing. I wonder if there's an application for mechanical keyboards with the different types of switches. I imagine the tactile feedback relates to it but there might be a way to further enhance the experience with this "seventh sense".

> Tactile-based Object Retrieval from Granular Media [0]

Home page with videos, and links to papers and github.

> Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media (Arxiv) [1]

Damn paywalls, when the material is available from the authors, and in much greater detail.

[0] https://jxu.ai/geotact/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04536

Yeah, this seems like a phenomena that I was already aware of.

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