implant for a better sense of time
hello. A while ago, my friend and I had an idea for an implant that would give a signal regularly (probably every 30 seconds or minute). The hope is that you would eventually subconsciously keep track of it, getting a much better (hopefully near perfect) sense of time. Could this work? is anyone aware of it or something similar being tried?
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Pick a section of you body that has hair and is In contact with clothing. I suggest a shirt personally. Shave it down, then walk around with a shirt on. You feel it rubbing and catching for about the first few hrs then it goes away.
Just a little thing you can do to see what the whole debate is about for growing used to it. Also for me it's the shoulders that work in my case.
The thing with the North Paw is that it's easy to interpret the stimulus, and it actually never does get habituated off, it just becomes less perceivable as you adjust to it and gradually gain an intuitive sense of magnetic north. The vibration of the north paw motor against your skin is strong enough that your nerve cells won't actually habituate to it.
Time seems somewhat harder of a sense to impart via neuroplasticity; rather than just a directional signal that you can discreteize to one of 8 possible settings, you presumably want at least 24 possible settings, and they need to be obvious enough apart that you can tell the difference.
Maybe you could do something like this with a North Paw (with 12 motors instead of 8), where each point represented an hour. This would get you most of the way there; you could do something like squeeze the bracelet tighter as the hour went on, or increase/decrease the vibration frequency, to try to tell time within the hour.
I'm not really convinced you would adapt to this the same was as a North Paw though; the North Paw has a continuous learning schedule (essentially) where you can turn and immediately feel a difference, so I feel like it would be easier for your brain to learn the association between vibration point and direction. This isn't continuous, so I wonder if you would learn it. You would also have to use a larger part of your body than the north paw; presumably the sensory resolution around your ankle isn't high enough to have 12 discrete points. Would work as a belt, though, or a chest strap sort of thing.
The North Paw was inspired by actual research, though. The challenge now is to see if that lab or others has done anything on this topic in particular.
I think the lowest-hanging fruit is just anything that vibrates at an increasing frequency over the course of an hour. You'd notice the downshift when it stepped from the highest frequency to the lowest frequency, so you'd know when the hour changed, and you'd have an intuitive sense (hopefully) of the time within the hour. This is sort of a haptic Franklin clock.
To put it another way, regardless of what a description of a not-yet-peer-reviewed study shows, I really doubt anyone trying to orient themselves absolutely via human magnetoreception would be able to do so. They probably wouldn't do better than chance, whereas a north paw wearer obviously would.
Link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/articles/2014/Babak_Parviz_the_visionary_behind_google_glass.html
This technology was in the prototype stages when these articles were written. Not sure If this doctor is still working on them. Anyone out there knowledgeable in MEMS/optoelectronics???