Click update 2013
Andre Willers
2 Nov 2013
Synopsis :
!Click is capable of being a full-scale map of the environment ,
comparable to vision , as well as a language .The Brain mechanisms exist to do
it .
Discussion :
1.The sensorium can be trained to build a “visual” representation
using sound input . See Appendix A.
2.The sensorium can easily be programmed . See Appendix B
3.The critical difference :
Sound is three dimensional .
This has obvious implications of internal monitoring and feedback
in the body .
4.Never mind the outside . Watch the inside of the body . The
tools in Appendix A can do it .
Heart , blood pressure , sports , etc .
5. Oilbirds , swiftlets and humans
All can echolocate .
The birds at about 2 KiloHerz
Humans at about 2-5 Herz ,
but with sophisticated data-analysis . But see Appendix B . Easily fooled .
Actually trained by experimenters .
6.See all previous Click Posts .
Here’s clicking at you , kid .
Andre
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Appendix A
See
A new device that restores a form of sight to the blind is turning
our understanding of the senses upside down
CLAIRE CHESKIN used to live in a murky world of
grey, her damaged eyes only seeing large objects if they were right next to
her. She could detect the outlines of people but not their expressions, and
could just about make out the silhouettes of buildings, but no details. Looking
into the distance? Forget it.
Nowadays things are looking distinctly brighter
for Cheskin. Using a device called vOICe, which translates visual images into
"soundscapes", she has trained her brain to "see through her
ears". When travelling, the device helps her identify points of interest;
at home she uses it to find things she has put down, like coffee cups.
"I've sailed across the English Channel and across the North Sea,
sometimes using the vOICe to spot landmarks," she says. "The lights
on the land were faint but the vOICe could pick them up."
As if the signposting of objects wasn't
impressive and useful enough, some long-term users of the device like Cheskin
eventually report complete images somewhat akin to normal sight, thanks to a
long-term rewiring of their brains. Sometimes these changes are so profound
that it alters their perceptions even when they aren't using the device. As
such, the vOICe (the "OIC" standing for "Oh, I See") is now
proving invaluable as a research tool, providing insights into the brain's
mind-boggling capacity for adaptation.
The idea of hijacking another sense to replace
lost vision has a long history. One of the first "sensory
substitution" devices was developed in 1969 by neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. He rigged up a television camera to a
dentist's chair, on which was a 20-by-20 array of stimulators that translated
images into tactile signals by vibrating against the participant's back.
Despite the crudeness of the set-up, it allowed blind participants to detect
the presence of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, while skilled users
could even associate the physical sensations with faces and common objects.
By the time he died in 2006, Bach-y-Rita had
developed more sophisticated devices which translated the camera's images into
electrical pulses delivered by a postage-stamp-sized array of electrodes
sitting on the tongue. Users found, after some practice, that these pulses gave
them a sense of depth and "openness", a feeling that there was
"something out there" (New Scientist, 29 July 2005, p 40).
This vague feeling of space, which we experience
as part of normal sight, suggests the brain may be handling the information as
if it had originated from the eyes. Would it be possible to get even closer to
normal vision- perhaps even producing vivid and detailed images- by feeding in
information using something other than tactile stimulation? To find out,
physicist and inventorPeter Meijer, based
in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, turned to hearing. The ears do not detect as
much information as the eyes, but their capacity is nevertheless much greater
than the skin's.
Meijer thought up the vOICe in 1982, though it
took until 1991 for him to design and build a desktop prototype that would
translate video into audio. By 1998 he had developed a portable, if still
bulky, version using a webcam, notebook PC and stereo headphones, which allowed
users to experiment with the device in daily life. The device is now more
discreet, consisting of "spy" sunglasses which conceal a tiny camera
connected to a netbook PC, and a pair of headphones. Alternatively, some users
download the software to their smartphone, and its built-in camera acts as
their eyes.
Every second the camera scans a scene from left
to right. Software then converts the images into soundscapes transmitted to the
headphones at a rate of roughly one per second (see diagram). Visual information from objects to the
wearer's left and right are fed into the left and right ear respectively.
Bright objects are louder, and frequency denotes whether an object is high up
or low down in the visual field.
At first the soundscapes are reminiscent of the
whirring, bleeping and hooting sound effects that would accompany an alien
melting the brain of a human in a 1960s science-fiction movie. But by feeling
the objects first, to learn to associate the accompanying sounds with their
shapes, and by discovering how the soundscape of an object varies as the user
moves, the experience becomes particularly "vision-like".
Pat Fletcher of Buffalo, New York, lost her
sight at the age of 21 and had just a pinpoint of perception in her left eye,
through which she could sometimes see red or green, before she started using
the vOICe system in 2000. In the early stages, the pictures in her mind's eye
were like "line drawings" and "simple holographic images", but
after a decade of practice, she now sees complete images with depth and
texture. "It is like looking at an old black-and-white movie from the
early 30s or 40s. I can see the tree from top to bottom, and the cracked
sidewalk that runs alongside the tree," she says.
"What's exciting to me," says Michael Proulx, a cognitive psychologist at Queen Mary,
University of London, who has been using the vOICe for his own research,
"is that not only can you use this device in a very deliberate fashion
where you can think, 'okay, this sound corresponds with this object', but it is
also possible, through extensive use, to go beyond that and actually have some
sort of direct, qualitative experience that is similar to the vision they used
to experience."
The US National Science Foundation is
now funding the first controlled study to look at the benefits of the vOICe
system while trying to find the optimal training protocol. "Some of the
participants in the current trial have learned more in months than [Fletcher]
learned in years of using the vOICe," says Meijer. The study, which will
involve around 10 participants, may even answer the long-standing question of
whether congenitally blind adults can benefit in the same way as Cheskin and
Fletcher.
Intended to last about a year, the trial is
being run by Luis Goncalves and Enrico Di Bernardo of MetaModal
in Pasadena, California, a company that tests sensory substitution
devices. The first two participants are a 66-year-old who has been blind from
birth but has slight light perception, and a 40-year-old who lost his sight due
to diabetes. Twice a week they attend two-hour training sessions, including
tasks such as finding a target in a large room and making their way around an
obstacle course. "They are empowered by this," says Goncalves, adding
that the 66-year-old "can now go to a restaurant and seat himself without
asking for assistance and is teaching his wife, who is also blind, how to use
the vOICe".
Not everyone is quite so impressed. For example, J. Kevin O'Regan, a psychologist at Descartes
University in Paris, France, points out that the system needs time to scan an
image and so lacks the immediacy of vision. "I think it's possible with
resources and time to make something much better than the vOICe," he says.
Seeing ear to ear?
Nevertheless, vOICe is still of great interest
to O'Regan and other researchers, who want to know what these people are
experiencing. Are they really seeing? And if so, how?
The traditional view is that the brain takes
data from the different sensory organs- in the case of sight, the retina- and,
for each sense, processes it in separate regions to create a picture of the
outside world. But that cannot explain how someone can have a visual experience
from purely auditory information.
As such, O'Regan says our definition of what it
means to see needs to change. Our senses, he argues, are defined by the way the
incoming information changes as we interact with the environment. If the
information obeys the laws of perspective as you move forward and backward, we will
experience it as "seeing"- no matter how the information is being
delivered. If you have a device that preserves these laws, then you should be
able to see through your ears or your skin, he says.
If O'Regan is on the right track, we will have
to reconsider long-held ideas of how the brain is organised to deal with
incoming information. Traditionally, the brain is considered to be highly
modular, with the occipital, temporal and parietal cortices handling inputs
from the eyes, ears and from the skin and deep tissues, respectively. According
to O'Regan, however, these regions may actually deal with certain types of
information- shape or texture, for example- irrespective of which sense it
comes from.
There is some evidence to support this view. In
2002, neuroscientist Amir Amedi, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, published
research showing that a specific part of the occipital cortex was activated by
touch as well as visual information. He named it the lateral occipital
tactile-visual (LOtv) region. Amedi and colleagues hypothesised that the area
lit up because the occipital cortex is oriented around particular tasks- in
this case, 3D-object recognition- rather than a single sense (Cerebral Cortex, vol 12, p 1202).
How does this tally with the vOICe experience?
Amedi recently collaborated with Alvaro Pascual-Leone,
director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation in
Boston, Massachusetts, to find out whether the vOICe system activates the LOtv
when users perceive objects through soundscapes. They asked 12 people,
including Fletcher, to examine certain objects such as a seashell, a bottle and
a rubber spider using touch and the vOICe system. They were then asked to
recognise the same objects using only the soundscapes delivered by vOICe. For
comparison, they were also asked to identify objects based on a characteristic
sound, such as the jingling of a set of keys.
During the trials, fMRI brain scans showed that
the LOtv region was active when expert users like Fletcher were decoding the
vOICe soundscapes, but significantly less active when they just heard
characteristic sounds. For those using the vOICe for the first time, the LOtv
region remained inactive, again suggesting that this area is important for the
recognition of 3D objects regardless of which sense produces the information (Nature Neuroscience,
vol 10, p 687).
Further evidence that this region is vital for
decoding soundscapes came two years later, in 2009, from a study using
repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) - short bursts of a
magnetic field that temporarily shut down the LOtv of subjects, including
Fletcher. "It felt like someone tapping on the back of my head," she
says. As the rTMS progressed, her vision with the vOICe deteriorated, and the
"world started getting darker, like someone slowly turning down the
lights".
When Fletcher attempted to use the vOICe after
undergoing rTMS, the various test no longer made sense. "It was total
confusion in my brain... I couldn't see anything." The result was
terrifying: "I wanted to cry because I thought they broke my sight - it
was like a hood over my head." The rTMS had a similar impact on other
vOICe users (Neuroreport, vol 20, p 132).
"It turns upside down the way we think
about the brain," says Pascual-Leone. Most of us think of our eyes as
being like cameras that capture whatever is in front of them and transmit it
directly to the brain, he says. But perhaps the brain is just looking for
certain kinds of information and will sift through the inputs to find the best
match, regardless of which sense it comes from.
Reconfiguring the brain
The question remains of how the vOICe users'
brains reconfigured the LOtv region to deal with the new source of information.
Amedi's preliminary fMRI scans show that in the early stages of training with
vOICe, the auditory cortex works hard to decode the soundscape, but after about
10 to 15 hours of training the information finds its way to the primary visual
cortex, and then to the LOtv region, which becomes active. Around this time the
individuals also become more adept at recognising objects with vOICe. "The
brain is doing a quick transition and using connections that are already
there," says Amedi. With further practice, the brain probably builds new
connections too, he adds.
Eventually, such neural changes may mean that
everyday sounds spontaneously trigger visual sensations, as Cheskin has
experienced for herself. "The shape depends on the noise," she says.
"There was kind of a spiky shape this morning when my pet cockatiel was
shrieking, and [the warning beeps of] a reversing lorry produce little
rectangles." Only loud noises trigger the sensations and, intriguingly,
she perceives the shape before the sound that sparked it.
This phenomenon can be considered a type of
synaesthesia, in which one sensation automatically triggers another, unrelated
feeling. Some individuals, for example, associate numbers or letters with a
particular colour: "R" may be seen as red while "P" is
yellow. For others, certain sounds trigger the perception of shapes and colours,
much as Cheskin has experienced.
Most synaesthetes first report such experiences
in early childhood, and it is very rare for an adult to spontaneously develop
synaesthesia, says Jamie Ward, a
psychologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. He recently published
a chronological log of Cheskin's and Fletcher's experiences, including the
synaesthetic ones (Consciousness and Cognition, vol 19, p 492).
This capacity to rewire our sensory processing
may even boost the learning abilities of sighted users, suggests Pascual-Leone.
It might be possible to extract supplementary information by feeding a lot of
different sensory inputs to the same brain areas. Art connoisseurs could learn
to associate the style of a master's hand with a characteristic sound, and this
may help them distinguish genuine work from a fake. Alternatively, it could
compensate for low light levels by delivering visual information through our
ears. "That's science fiction. But it's interesting science fiction,"
says Pascual-Leone.
For neuroscientists like Pascual-Leone and
Amedi, the research is proof that the ability to learn as we grow old does not
disappear. Pascual-Leone says the notion of a critical period during which the
brain must be exposed to particular knowledge or never learn it appears
"not universally true". "It gives us a reason for hope," he
says, "and implies that we should be able to help people adjust to sensory
losses with this type of substitution. The capacity to recover function could
be much greater than realised."
Bijal Trivedi is a writer based in Washington DC
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Appendix B
Three-card-monte and Bats
Andre
Willers
11 May 2008
Will Bats go
for Three-card-monte ?
And how !
The poor
suckers will be hooked from moment go .
The better
the sensory equipment , the bigger the sucker . (AW)
Their
sensorium can see not only the position of each card , but also the direction
it is moved in . But being of a mammalian order , there is a left-hand and
right-hand brain memory stack with a limited capacity The oldest item gets
pushed down and out .
The brain
also moves data about the left-hand stack to the right-hand stack to keep track
of the object before it is painted on the sensorium . And vise-versa of course
.
In humans ,
it has been shown by fMRI that if the switch is done faster than the left-right
transfer rate , the memory at the bottom of the stack is lost . This is not an
illusion . The hand is not faster than the eye . The hand is faster than a
rather bureaucratic information transfer of data in the brain .
The eyes
sees perfectly well , but the memory system loses track .
What is
amazing here is the low frequency . The visual system keeps track at about
beta-brain freq (ie about 16 herz) . Hand switching is about 4 herz .It seems
to take at least 4 cycles to move data from the left-hand of the brain to the
right-hand . For error-correction included , this seems about correct .
(Systems
without error-correction – see amygdala systems))
So , for
something not deemed critical to survival , the mammalian system gives a whole
whopping quarter of a second leeway .
Like humans
, bats , whales , dolphins , etc simply will not believe that they can lose track
of an object moved faster than 4 times a second . They will try over and over
again . It does not matter how good their sensory system is .
Another
definition of being a mammalian : susceptibility to Three-Card-Monte
You can hook
humans , bats ,dolphins ,whales to the internal endorphins .
Then lead
them into some serious gambling .
Remember ,
the rewards are internal endorphin releases . Creatures in virtual isolation
are extremely vulnerable . Suckers .
Then , you
can teach them poker or mah-jong .
Dolphins and
whales should be pretty good at mah-jong or go , but bats should be whizzes at
poker .
The problem
in training humans or mammalians is usually what reward makes sense to them .
The endorphin reward of gambling is mammalian specific and general .
You can hook
any mammal on gambling .
Then uplift
them . For their own good , of course .
The unending
route of effort for relative advantages .
Do birds
gamble?
We know that
all mammals have a primitive neural knot that releases endorphins on gambling .
This is a major reason for their success and ties in with boredom .
For
dinosaurs and birds we can look to the ripple effects after the KT boundary .
Dinosaur
descendants quickly repopulated (large bird-like raptors) But speciation into
the empty ecological niches (the small ones) was faster in mammals because of
the random “gambling” nerve-complexes in mammals . Taking a chance paid off if
the pay-off is biased in the positive direction .
This has
been the general experience of mammalians since then .
From this ,
we can infer that birds (and dinosaurs before them) did not gamble .
If the bias
does not favour you , you are doomed anyway . You have to bet as if the bias
favours you .
You have to
bet .
And try to
figure out a way to change the bias in your favour .
This is why
you are a mammal and not a bird-dinosaur .
PS
You can get
bankrupt betting this way .
Andre
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