[ACTOR: Lesson number five. I feel like oil futures are going to crash today. (Repeated in another language.) Now you try.]

JAD ABUMRAD: Next up, producer Tim Howard.

TIM HOWARD: Yes. Hi. Hello. So when I heard about this story with Emilie and the BrainPort, I immediately called up this guy.

TIM: Hey, John. Which microphone? Is it this one or this one?

JOHN: It's that one there. 

TIM: Okay.

TIM: You might remember him.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: I'm David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine.

TIM: Called him up because I came across this thing that he's working on that is sort of like the next generation of crazy. It's called ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: The VEST, which stands for the Variable Extrasensory Sensory Transducer. And it's a vest that you wear underneath your clothing. And this vest has 24 motors on it, little vibratory motors just like the ones in your cell phone. And ...

TIM: And VEST connects to your phone.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So we pick up sound ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hi, this is Time-Warner Cable calling with an opportunity for you to provide us with valuable feedback.]

DAVID EAGLEMAN: ... through a cell phone. And the cell phone does all the computational work to then convert that sound into patterns of vibration on the VEST. And you feel a buzzing all over your torso—bzzt! Different motors running at different amplitudes. It actually changes every 20 milliseconds, so it's a moving pattern. And it might seem impossible that you could actually extract something useful about what's being said ...

TIM: But when David brings deaf volunteers into the lab and has them do a particular training on the VEST, he says that over the course of 12 days ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: People get really good at word recognition.

TIM: Somehow they begin to intuitively recognize that this means "hi" or "blue" or "chair."

DAVID EAGLEMAN: If you tried to concentrate on it and figure out how each motor translates to some part of that sound you would never figure it out. But the good news is, you don't have to do it consciously. The brain is a specialist at extracting statistical information.

TIM: And because the brain is so good at this kind of translation, says David, what he really wants to do is use this vest to create new senses.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: So what if you fed in stock market data ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ten.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Seventy bid, twenty-five, twenty-five.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Sold at twenty-five, seventy-five, bid at seventy-eight.]

TIM: … and converted that into the buzzing?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Could you develop an immediate perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet? And would you, without having any conscious awareness of how or why you're feeling a certain way, could you have an intuition like, "You know, I kind of feel like oil futures are gonna crash today."

TIM: You wouldn't be analyzing all this information, you would just feel it.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: We're also working on feeding in ...

[NEWS CLIP: You are seeing a tremendous amount of rainfall ...]

DAVID EAGLEMAN: ... real-time weather data from the—let's say, 200 miles around you.

TIM: Question is ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Would you end up having an intuition ...

[ACTOR: Peekskill, ice storm.]

DAVID EAGLEMAN: ... that's better than what the weatherman can tell you on the news?

TIM: Or this one.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: What if we took 500,000 tweets per second, passed it through some natural language processing to sort of have a higher-level summary of what's going on ...

TIM: ... and pump all that information through the VEST.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: … would you develop a sense of what's happening on the planet, where you suddenly say, "Ooh, I feel like something just happened in Nairobi." And, "Oh, I think the Canadians have just, you know, finalized their election of something." I don't know what this will be like yet, but there's no reason to expect any limit on what the brain will be able to develop an immediate perceptual experience about.

JAD: More experiments in translation in a moment.

[DARLENE: This is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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