Can we create new senses for humans? | David Eagleman

Marrying the flexibility of the brain to the burgeoning creativity of the VR design world, we’re moving into an era in which our virtual identities will no longer be limited to the bodies that we happen to have evolved.

Vision is more like three senses—motion, color, and luminance (black-and-white contrast).

Visualizations should harness all of our senses, tapping into an imagined and “felt” experience of them.

For all our limitations, human perception is the antithesis of this. We see the world holistically, not just identifying but understanding its contents—their relationships, their meanings, their pasts, and their futures. The gist. We aren’t merely witnesses, but storytellers. It felt like it was time for algorithms to learn how to do the same.

The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences—things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany. They connect animals to their surroundings. And they connect animals to each other