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감각의 미래
How do we know what’s real? That’s not a trick question: sensory science is increasingly finding that we don’t perceive reality: we create it through perception. In We Have the Technology, science writer Kara Platoni guides us through the latest developments in the science of sensory perception.
We Have the Technology introduces us to researchers who are changing the way we experience the world, whether creating scents that stimulate the memories of Alzheimer’s patients, constructing virtual limbs that approximate a sense of touch, or building augmented reality labs that prepare soldiers for the battlefield. These diverse investigations not only explain previously elusive aspects of human experience, but offer tantalizing glimpses into a future when we can expand, control, and enhance our senses as never before.
A fascinating tour of human capability and scientific ingenuity, We Have the Technology offers essential insights into the nature and possibilities of human experience.
We Have the Technology introduces us to researchers who are changing the way we experience the world, whether creating scents that stimulate the memories of Alzheimer’s patients, constructing virtual limbs that approximate a sense of touch, or building augmented reality labs that prepare soldiers for the battlefield. These diverse investigations not only explain previously elusive aspects of human experience, but offer tantalizing glimpses into a future when we can expand, control, and enhance our senses as never before.
A fascinating tour of human capability and scientific ingenuity, We Have the Technology offers essential insights into the nature and possibilities of human experience.
459 pages, Paperback
First published December 8, 2015
15 people are currently reading
409 people want to read
About the author
Kara Platoni
1 book19 followersKara Platoni is a science reporter based in Oakland, California. She was a staff writer at the East Bay Express alt-weekly newspaper for many years, and freelances to all kinds of nerdly publications. She teaches at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 17 reviews
February 15, 2016
With self-contained chapters devoted to the 5 built-in senses, metasenses (time, emotion, pain), and future hacks across those (VR, AR, new senses) I found this to be a very approachable and matter-of-fact survey of current research and technology on human perception. Given how current and fast-paced these fields are, if this book is of interest to you, I would recommend reading it soon.
I enjoyed that each chapter could stand on its own, such that you can pick this up and just finish the chapters you find most interesting. I did keep wishing I could experience the same experiments that Kara was undergoing, especially in the VR chapter.
The one spot the book fell short was that the potentially net new senses, and novel repairs to damaged senses, open up a host of social, legal, and political questions which were teased at but not really explored. I also felt the book was very focused on US based research and I can't help but wonder if there are differing viewpoints and edges of research going on abroad.
I enjoyed that each chapter could stand on its own, such that you can pick this up and just finish the chapters you find most interesting. I did keep wishing I could experience the same experiments that Kara was undergoing, especially in the VR chapter.
The one spot the book fell short was that the potentially net new senses, and novel repairs to damaged senses, open up a host of social, legal, and political questions which were teased at but not really explored. I also felt the book was very focused on US based research and I can't help but wonder if there are differing viewpoints and edges of research going on abroad.
March 29, 2016
A fascinating, well-researched, and well-reported look at the world of sensory augmentation, from the biohackers of "Grindhouse" to the university neuroscientists researching our senses of taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch. I enjoyed Platoni's first-person reportorial style, which brings readers right into the labs and basements of her subjects without ever being intrusive. If you want to find out exactly how far out the cutting edge is, this book is a great place to start--though by this time, as the author readily admits, many of the breakthroughs she writes about will already have been surpassed.
November 24, 2017
The book would probably be a must-read for the people who do not routinely read books on neurobiology. A lot of the things in the book are known to me already, but for some people it will all be a revelation.
I heard about this book from a review of the "Stealing Fire..." book. Having read both books now, I wonder if that reviewer completely missed the point or plain did not read the book. Anyway, I was very interested in reading "We Have the Technology" and I was not impressed. Though, truth be told, these two books are not about the same thing, anyway, I am still not sure why that reviewer even compared them. I am glad he did, though, as it led me to this book and it was an easy reading.
I heard about this book from a review of the "Stealing Fire..." book. Having read both books now, I wonder if that reviewer completely missed the point or plain did not read the book. Anyway, I was very interested in reading "We Have the Technology" and I was not impressed. Though, truth be told, these two books are not about the same thing, anyway, I am still not sure why that reviewer even compared them. I am glad he did, though, as it led me to this book and it was an easy reading.
December 14, 2023
3.5 An uneven book. Some is very interesting. Some...why a chapter about the most accurate clock in the world? Also, the philosophical and ethical issues of people changing their own bodies--adding magnets to their fingers, chips under their skin--that went on a bit too long.
Chapters on eyesight, smell, hearing--still interesting. But you have to get past the weirdness.
Chapters on eyesight, smell, hearing--still interesting. But you have to get past the weirdness.
March 11, 2017
Never has such an inquisitive person spent so much time exploring what humans given to experience life, and how hyper-focused people are enhancing that experience by (sometimes) experimenting on themselves.
June 13, 2016
A book-sized collection of fun facts organised around our senses old and new, like:
Cats can't taste sweetness, they exhibit no preference for either plain water or sugar.
Ageing brings out the taste of everything because it breaks big molecules into smaller compounds.
The smell version of the cultural problem: we all have different memory connections to odours, tempered by where we come from, the foods we grew up eating, the holidays we celeberate. The same odorant molecules may be perceived in wildly different ways.
Objects in the world have no inherent colour. What we perceive as colour is the wavelengths of light reflected from surfaces interacting with our cones, not anything native to the wavelength or object itself.
When listening to speech the brain uses a filtering strategy called categorical perception, compartmentalising sounds into meaningful categories (e.g. ba to da to ga without any intermediates)
Touch receptors contain 4 kinds of nerve fibres:
-Merkel cell-neurite complexes, which are prominent in the fingerpads, are tuned for detecting fine spatial resolution, points and textures.
-Meissner corpuscles respond to low-frequency vibrations, like those caused by objects slipping from the hand, and help you control your grip.
-Pacinian corpuscles respond to higher-frequency vibrations, like those caused when a tool in your hand touches a hard surface.
-Ruffini endings act in concert over a large area, and are sensitive to the stretching of skin as your body moves.
Time is a measure of how much the world around us changes.
The precision of atomic clocks isn't meant to measure the time of the day, but interval time - in particular the length of a second. It's the more important commodity because components of electrical or networked systems run off frequency. The more accurate one can define the second, the more stable one can realise frequency. This would make radar and GPS more accurate, internet speeds higher, and cell towers to hand off calls to each other without dropping them.
Pain is polysensory: Pain is not necessarily from overstimulation of our regular senses. But that is also a possible source of pain.
There are two parts to pain: The sensory component: Objective information like where is the pain coming from, how intense and what kind of pain is it? The second part is the emotional valence, how distressing is it, and one's urge to reduce its unpleasantness.
Social pain hurts more than physical pain, possibly because of uncertainty. The end is indefinite, and the healing process is less obvious than a bodily injury.
The mental agitation, the unending ping-pong between hope and despair makes social pain outlive physical pain. It's harder to get away from, because how do you get away from your mind?
Apparently people adapt quite readily to controlling extra virtual limbs, having their arms and legs swapped or having extra long limbs.
Cats can't taste sweetness, they exhibit no preference for either plain water or sugar.
Ageing brings out the taste of everything because it breaks big molecules into smaller compounds.
The smell version of the cultural problem: we all have different memory connections to odours, tempered by where we come from, the foods we grew up eating, the holidays we celeberate. The same odorant molecules may be perceived in wildly different ways.
Objects in the world have no inherent colour. What we perceive as colour is the wavelengths of light reflected from surfaces interacting with our cones, not anything native to the wavelength or object itself.
When listening to speech the brain uses a filtering strategy called categorical perception, compartmentalising sounds into meaningful categories (e.g. ba to da to ga without any intermediates)
Touch receptors contain 4 kinds of nerve fibres:
-Merkel cell-neurite complexes, which are prominent in the fingerpads, are tuned for detecting fine spatial resolution, points and textures.
-Meissner corpuscles respond to low-frequency vibrations, like those caused by objects slipping from the hand, and help you control your grip.
-Pacinian corpuscles respond to higher-frequency vibrations, like those caused when a tool in your hand touches a hard surface.
-Ruffini endings act in concert over a large area, and are sensitive to the stretching of skin as your body moves.
Time is a measure of how much the world around us changes.
The precision of atomic clocks isn't meant to measure the time of the day, but interval time - in particular the length of a second. It's the more important commodity because components of electrical or networked systems run off frequency. The more accurate one can define the second, the more stable one can realise frequency. This would make radar and GPS more accurate, internet speeds higher, and cell towers to hand off calls to each other without dropping them.
Pain is polysensory: Pain is not necessarily from overstimulation of our regular senses. But that is also a possible source of pain.
There are two parts to pain: The sensory component: Objective information like where is the pain coming from, how intense and what kind of pain is it? The second part is the emotional valence, how distressing is it, and one's urge to reduce its unpleasantness.
Social pain hurts more than physical pain, possibly because of uncertainty. The end is indefinite, and the healing process is less obvious than a bodily injury.
The mental agitation, the unending ping-pong between hope and despair makes social pain outlive physical pain. It's harder to get away from, because how do you get away from your mind?
Apparently people adapt quite readily to controlling extra virtual limbs, having their arms and legs swapped or having extra long limbs.
September 19, 2016
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better... stronger... faster.”
- Opening narration to The Six Million Dollar Man
We Have the Technology by science journalist Kara Platoni describes efforts being made to augment human senses through the use of technology. These range from the mundane (eye glasses are a form of visual augmentation for example) to cutting edge technologies to tap into the brain’s electrical signals.
Platoni begins with a tour of the five senses (taste, smell, hearing, vision, and touch) and describes some of the cutting edge research being done in these areas. I would characterize some of this work as more interesting and important than others. For example, research being done to determine whether there is a 6th or 7th taste (to go along with sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami) probably isn’t as life-changing as the potential to restore vision to someone who has lost there sight, but who am I to judge?
She next discusses what she dubs ‘metasensory perception’ which includes our sense of time, pain and emotions and the text drifts off into the weeds like a golfer searching an overgrown woodlot for a lost ball.
Finally, in the last few chapters Platoni returns to the biohackers and grinders looking to ways to modify human perception. It’s a fascinating look at a lunatic fringe that should have made up the bulk of the book’s content.
The introductory chapter has a cool and lively vibe that seem to mix the hip, cyberpunk flair of William Gibson’s Neuromancer with the science journalism of Carl Zimmer. I thought this approach would be carried throughout the book, but beginning with Chapter One Platoni settles into a workmanlike journalistic tone that is as serviceable as it is unremarkable. It’s a shame she didn’t stick with the premise of the book, but perhaps she wasn’t able to generate enough content and resorted to text padding instead.
- Opening narration to The Six Million Dollar Man
We Have the Technology by science journalist Kara Platoni describes efforts being made to augment human senses through the use of technology. These range from the mundane (eye glasses are a form of visual augmentation for example) to cutting edge technologies to tap into the brain’s electrical signals.
Platoni begins with a tour of the five senses (taste, smell, hearing, vision, and touch) and describes some of the cutting edge research being done in these areas. I would characterize some of this work as more interesting and important than others. For example, research being done to determine whether there is a 6th or 7th taste (to go along with sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami) probably isn’t as life-changing as the potential to restore vision to someone who has lost there sight, but who am I to judge?
She next discusses what she dubs ‘metasensory perception’ which includes our sense of time, pain and emotions and the text drifts off into the weeds like a golfer searching an overgrown woodlot for a lost ball.
Finally, in the last few chapters Platoni returns to the biohackers and grinders looking to ways to modify human perception. It’s a fascinating look at a lunatic fringe that should have made up the bulk of the book’s content.
The introductory chapter has a cool and lively vibe that seem to mix the hip, cyberpunk flair of William Gibson’s Neuromancer with the science journalism of Carl Zimmer. I thought this approach would be carried throughout the book, but beginning with Chapter One Platoni settles into a workmanlike journalistic tone that is as serviceable as it is unremarkable. It’s a shame she didn’t stick with the premise of the book, but perhaps she wasn’t able to generate enough content and resorted to text padding instead.
February 12, 2016
How do we know what and how we are seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling? If someone loses one or more of their senses, what technology is available today to help the person if not regain the lost sense at least a sort of perception of the sense? How do scientists identify and study brain activity when someone actually hears something and when that person 'hears' an internal voice in his head? Can this internal voice be replicated through technology to help those who have lost their ability to hear external sounds? That's just one of the chapters. In this fascinating book, scientists, researchers, gamers, roboticists, body artists and physicists with brilliant ideas or intense curiosity have contributed to research and innovation to help augment or enhance our sensory perceptions.
January 12, 2016
I knew that reality is synthesized in my head but I had no idea that language can drive what I taste or that culture can determine how I express emotion. What? So language and culture shape my reality? That's one of my gems from the book. But you will likely find your own surprises. The book is a well researched guided tour of research labs, basements, and even bars, where scientists and others are puzzling about human perception and ways to augment perception. It's all nicely tied together with a story arc (that I won't reveal here). Oh, did I mention page-turner?
Read
January 27, 2016Cool science writing about a thought-provoking topic. A discussion on the role of smell in therapy for Alzheimer's patients was especially intriguing. I managed to catch the author on NPR a few days after finishing the book.
May 1, 2016
Beautifully written and engaging. It's incredible that we live in a world that is so advanced that it can help people with all sorts of disabilities. The cover and title were an interesting choice and wasn't expecting the quality that was produced from the book.
August 9, 2016
I cried, I laughed, and now I want to be a biohacker.
November 21, 2016
Wonderful. I really liked the information and the way it was presented. It gets better in the second half; as a biologist, the first half was a bit repetitive in terms of theory.
April 3, 2017
A tour of all the weird and wonderful ways people are exploring, enhancing and trying to extend human senses.
This is a fascinating read for anyone with a little geek in them. Not only do you learn a lot about how human senses work, but you learn some of the cutting edge research in each area. I think the most exciting were the ways they are able to restore some aspect of vision and hearing to blind and deaf people, and what they're doing with smell to help Alzheimer's patients. The most culturally interesting was the section on taste and how our culture can determine what we can perceive, though the pain and emotion chapters also explored how our culture affects how we express and read those. And of course, there's all the ways people are biohacking themselves to try and extend their senses - which ranges from interesting to downright freaky. One aspect of this book that is both a boon and a hindrance for readers is that it can get very scientifically technical. That's a good thing for those who want the nitty gritty details, it will probably be a bad thing for those without a science background. Even for those who have a science background it will slow down the reading a bit since some sections read more like scientific journal entries than a casual geek magazine (and why it took me several months to read this). Another unavoidable pitfall for a book like this is that as soon as it goes on shelves it becomes dated. In another few years this will all be old news. So if you're interested, and a little geeky, and not too likely to get freaked out by knowing the potential invasive tech ideas out there, pick this up soon.
Notes on content: Random appearances of mild to moderate swear words (during quotes), and about a dozen strong swears in quotes from interviewees. No sexual content. Some description of surgeries. No violence really.
This is a fascinating read for anyone with a little geek in them. Not only do you learn a lot about how human senses work, but you learn some of the cutting edge research in each area. I think the most exciting were the ways they are able to restore some aspect of vision and hearing to blind and deaf people, and what they're doing with smell to help Alzheimer's patients. The most culturally interesting was the section on taste and how our culture can determine what we can perceive, though the pain and emotion chapters also explored how our culture affects how we express and read those. And of course, there's all the ways people are biohacking themselves to try and extend their senses - which ranges from interesting to downright freaky. One aspect of this book that is both a boon and a hindrance for readers is that it can get very scientifically technical. That's a good thing for those who want the nitty gritty details, it will probably be a bad thing for those without a science background. Even for those who have a science background it will slow down the reading a bit since some sections read more like scientific journal entries than a casual geek magazine (and why it took me several months to read this). Another unavoidable pitfall for a book like this is that as soon as it goes on shelves it becomes dated. In another few years this will all be old news. So if you're interested, and a little geeky, and not too likely to get freaked out by knowing the potential invasive tech ideas out there, pick this up soon.
Notes on content: Random appearances of mild to moderate swear words (during quotes), and about a dozen strong swears in quotes from interviewees. No sexual content. Some description of surgeries. No violence really.
April 19, 2017
My favorite part? The grinders.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 17 reviews