The biohack.me forums were originally run on Vanilla and ran from January 2011 to July 2024. They are preserved here as a read-only archive. If you had an account on the forums and are in the archive and wish to have either your posts anonymized or removed entirely, email us and let us know.
While we are no longer running Vanilla, Patreon badges are still being awarded, and shoutout forum posts are being created, because this is done directly in the database via an automated task.
Haptics And Plasticity That Is Cool as Shit
Believe me, that title sounded a lot more clever to me than it did to you. Plus, I've had a long week :P
It is well-established that brain plasticity is enough to cause the sensory data, from the neodymium magnets as well as haptic devices, to be just as natural as the data from any of our other senses. In other words, it gives us new "senses" in the truest sense (pun intended) of the word.
However, I remember last year, when the Sapiens Anonym blog was getting far less traffic, but far more updates, someone (I think @DirectorX) was saying something about how a researcher found that, in addition to the adaptation to the sense, the brain was actually (after a few months or so) putting aside a region dedicated to that sense, much like there is a region dedicated to sight.
So, the question is, does anyone have any information about this research? I think that the extent of our brain plasticity is fairly important to what we do here, and is interesting in any case.
~Ian
It is well-established that brain plasticity is enough to cause the sensory data, from the neodymium magnets as well as haptic devices, to be just as natural as the data from any of our other senses. In other words, it gives us new "senses" in the truest sense (pun intended) of the word.
However, I remember last year, when the Sapiens Anonym blog was getting far less traffic, but far more updates, someone (I think @DirectorX) was saying something about how a researcher found that, in addition to the adaptation to the sense, the brain was actually (after a few months or so) putting aside a region dedicated to that sense, much like there is a region dedicated to sight.
So, the question is, does anyone have any information about this research? I think that the extent of our brain plasticity is fairly important to what we do here, and is interesting in any case.
~Ian
Comments
Displaying 1 comment
-
I emailed Haworth about this a long time ago, but didn't hear back. I suspect the researcher he was telling me about was Todd Huffman. I found this recent paper by Huffman: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5898141 Wish I knew more.
Displaying 1 comment