Get ready for Transhumanism "It would be a mistake to think of transhumanism as a domain whose practitioners are limited to DIY biohackers, science fiction aficionados, and immortality-chasers who’ve got cryonics chambers reserved for their bodies. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in ways his research on human perception can translate into an altered or heightened ability to apprehend the world. A few years ago he created what you might think of as a very crude apparatus for slowing down people’s experience of time so they can complete certain tasks more quickly. (The apparatus was a bungee jumping cord. Free-falling backwards, it turns out, makes it feel as if time is drawn out. While plummeting, people can read a rapid series of numbers that would scroll by too quickly to read under normal circumstances.) More recently, Eagleman’s lab has been developing a vest designed to transmit data in the form of vibrations. He’s starting with auditory signals to allow deaf people to feel sound, but like Rich Lee’s magnetic ears, such a vest could in theory receive anything from a blog feed to your bank statement. Work like Eagleman’s may one day make the entire universe of “invisible light”—that enormous fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot perceive, including radio waves, x-rays, infrared and ultraviolet rays—as accessible as a pair of glasses."
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 03:16:40 +0000
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