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| Science & Technology |
| Strange Science: Seeing with Your Skin |
| 2008-10-04 |
| Getting close to total wacko but still interesting |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #3 Concentrate, Grasshopper. Concentrate. |
| Posted by: KBK 2008-10-04 16:48 |
| #2 When I am near congress critters, my skin crawls. I believe totally in the phenomenon. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2008-10-04 14:52 |
| #1 Not as outrageous as it sounds. Sensory interpretation is the vast majority of perception. It has long been established that even our common senses uptake vastly greater amounts of information than our brains use. Of this fraction of information, we then carefully skim a very limited number of bits of data. For example, when you look at a photograph of a human face, you ignore your peripheral vision to focus on the photograph. But even in the photograph, your focus darts around from point to point to point. The most common point of focus is the eyes, which are visited repeatedly At any given moment, you therefore have less than 1% focus on your "overall" view, all on the photograph, and less than 1% of that in focus on a particular point on the photograph. Everything else *can* be paid attention to, but isn't. It exists in temporary memory as an afterimage. Add to that synethesia, which is a variation from the norm of how sensory input is interpreted, like "hearing" colors, "smelling" music, "feeling" perspective, etc., and you are left with potential capabilities far beyond what most people normally can experience. In the case of skin cells, if they can react in different ways to different bandwidths or intensities of light, then they are basically seeing, if they send variable signals to the brain. Most of the work is in how the brain learns to interpret that information. So all that needs to be done is to train the brain to correctly interpret a different type of the surfeit of data. We also know that the brain can do this, and it can be dramatic. A classic experiment was of a man who put on special glasses that made him see the world as upside down. Within just a few weeks, his brain relearned to see, adjusting the image so that it was right side up again. When he removed the special glasses, he was naturally seeing the world upside down. In some traditions, seers were believed to see through their skin, but importantly, not in the same way we see with our eyes. They were able to see a person and know it was a person, but it didn't look anything like a person. Importantly, their eyes were closed at the time, to limit visual data and prevent data overload. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-10-04 12:53 |