I think there are you know literally hundreds or thousands of discoveries to be made quite accidentally like that just from walking around with an infrared detector ultraviolet and it's not that people don't have cool stuff set up in Labs I mean it's not like we've never seen an UltraViolet or infrared but doing it as a citizen scientist and just walking around in the world I think we'll pick up on lots of stuff

when it comes to for example people who are deaf there's a learning curve everything has this learning curve to it but when it came to blind people understanding three-dimensional space there was Zero learning curve they immediately got it immediately

prosthetic leg um you have a very difficult time walking because obviously you're not getting any smata Sensation from the leg so we just just put in pressure and angle sensors o sorry we put in pressure and angle sensors and then the person can feel uh what the leg is doing and um an

a lot of people as they get older their vestibular function diminishes and they can't tell when they're tilting they can't tell when they're off axis and the problem is then they end up falling and they break a hip and they end up in the hospital and then things go downhill so um we just we built a little um you know a n axis uh motion detector and IMU and we can tell where they are axis wise and and when they're tilted we just tell them and they feel it on their wrist

you know play tones you feel the buzz and uh and after eight weeks it's driven the tenus down it it's not a cure people don't H have a lack of tenus but it's clinically very significant

we made this thing called the clarify for people with high frequency hearing loss

The Buzz for deafness

all deaf people that I've met so far are surprised that microwaves make beeps or your car blinker makes a clicking sound you these are just things they didn't know and so there's all kinds of stuff they're picking up on

when you hear something you know your eardrum is vibrating that goes your CIA stuff happens ships off to your brain but it's all happening in here and yet you believe you hear the dog out there and it turns out the same thing happens after about half a year of wearing this

it's a linear increase in performance and the reason I mentioned that is because as probably know that's the signature of unconscious learning

we impute three-dimensionality onto the world as we walk around we use things like Parallax and assumptions about what thing is bigger than what other thing and so on

little camera on glasses and you turn it into an audio image um and there are very sophisticated examples of this now one is called The Voice v i and it's it's an app that you can just download on your phone

define spirituality

Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground. The term was first defined by neuroscientist David Eagleman in relation to his book of fiction Sum. Asked whether he was an atheist or a religious person on a National Public Radio interview in 2009, he replied "I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. 00:11:53 And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. 00:12:22 Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. 00:12:47 (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. 00:13:20 So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) 00:14:06 So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.