"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1480861.ScN2DhMLZI@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
And we are yet to download scents, aren't we? If only there was an
electronic
peripheral that could stimulate the taste buds and sense of smell.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4006
<quote>
Taste combines the feel of food in the mouth with chemical and even auditory
cues. Hiroo Iwata of the University of Tsukuba in Japan and colleagues call
it the "last frontier of virtual reality".
But it is a frontier they have now crossed. "The food simulator is the first
media technology that is put into the mouth," says Iwata.
</quote>
[...]
__/ [ Oliver Wong ] on Thursday 14 September 2006 14:59 \__
If the big companies can channel information directly, presumably
someone would write a 3rd party client so we could all channel
information
to each other, so telepathy would become much more common place. That
said,
human memory is faillible, so if I "hear" a song in my head, and then
send
my memory of what the song sounded like to you, the memory of the
recording
may differ significantly from the original song.
What if you 'stream' it?
(This is all speculation, of course, since the involved technology
doesn't exist yet. Nevertheless, here's how I imagine it'd likely work.)
If I just acted as a node and sent you exactly what I got without my
brain interpreting the data along the way, then it's not so much telepathy
as it is that I have a wireless router surgically implanted in my head
(which AFAIK is already currently feasible with today's technology).
Similarly if we just embed wireless microphones in my ear (like an
undercover cop might do to record incriminating speech): This too is already
possible, and doesn't involve my brain receiving and re-send the data.
However, if I, for example, am hearing sounds with my own ear, and I
wish to send those sounds to you via telepathy, then what you'd actually be
receiving is my interpretation of the sound, rather than the sound itself,
which may be subtly different. For example, if I were hard of hearing, then
I wouldn't hear parts of the sounds present around me, and I couldn't send
you anything I can't actually hear.
If someone (e.g. Sony) is streaming music to my brain, and I'm
"perceiving" that music somehow, and then I try to stream the same song to
you, again there may be some distortion due to my particular interpretation
or perception of the song. I don't know what the nature of those distortions
might be, but I do know that experiments have been done (involving e.g.
electrodes implanted directly in the brain) which show that memory can be
consistently faillible even when the event being "remembered" happened less
than 1 second ago. The experiments are mentioned towards the end of Roger
Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" and showed that the brain could be fooled
about the order of two events.
Ironically, my own recollection about the experiment is a bit porous
(it's a very long book, and these experiments are but a side anecdote in a
much bigger discussion about the implications of a theory of quantum gravity
on self-awareness), but I believe that the experimenters could actually
control what the subject would believe the order of the events to be,
regardless of their actual order. That is, they might have event A always
occur before event B, but could control whether their subjects would claim
that they saw A before B, or saw B before A.
So I imagine Sony would stream a song directly into my mind, and my
neurons would try to "engrave" this song into my short term memory, and in
this engraving process, flaws and distortions are ALREADY injected. Then,
milliseconds later, my brain will try to read the audio data from the short
term memory (perhaps injecting further distortions), and send it to you. So
your stream might have a delay of only a few milliseconds with respect to
the stream I'm hearing, and yet still contain errors coloured by my
perspective.
Hopefully the differences will be minor. But if you then stream the song
to someone else, and they stream it to yet someone else, we'll quickly have
a game of "broken telephone" going on.
- Oliver
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