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You are probably still unaware of that, but cyborgs are among us, from the milions of pacemaker users to Neil Harbisson, who can hear colors. This is a quiet revolution that is taking place right now and that we still have to recognize. It has the potential to disrupt our everyday life and our health.
So sit back, relax and enjoy this 5-minutes jump into the future.
The word umwelt refers to the world that we can perceive, from sunlight to the sweetness of a strawberry; but most of the world lies hidden to us: we cannot see infrared radiation, like snakes do, and we cannot feel the magnetic field of Earth, like birds do.
Sensory augmentation is all about unlocking this new sensations, expanding our umwelt. The techniques were initially developed in the medical field as a substitution for the loss of one sense, for example Neil Harbisson was born seeing in grey-scale, but now he can hear colors.
Before I reveal how its done, a brief primer on the brain: when we are born we cannot see, we learn to do that, our brain receives inputs from the whole body and is incredibly efficient in figuring out what they mean. This plasticity of the brain is at the top at the beginning of our life, but doesn’t vanish later.