[wordup] Today's vocabulary word is "proprioception".

[Adam Shand]

I echo Jamie's sentiment, "this article *IS* full of awesome".

Read the Wired article or the authors blog for details.

Adam.

From: http://jwz.livejournal.com/748322.html
More: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

Today's vocabulary word is "proprioception". 	
[Sat, 31-Mar-2007 9:13 PM]

This article is full of awesome. I want new sensory organs too!

    For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring
sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower,
Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a
wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads -- the same weight-and-gear
modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a
power supply and a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field.
Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

    "It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the
bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the
peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I
finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. Deep
into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my
perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in
my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't
get lost, even in a completely new place."

    On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was
conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration
in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake. [...]

    When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin
who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people
wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had
remapped in expectation of the new input. "Sometimes I would even get a
phantom buzzing." He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances
at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two
post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from
work. "My living space shrank quickly," says König. "The world appeared
smaller and more chaotic."

    [...]

    During a long brainstorm session, they wondered whether the tongue
could actually augment sight for the visually impaired. I tried the
prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with spare electronics parts,
Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a plastic box the size of a
brick around my neck and gave me the mouthpiece. "Some people hold it
still, and some keep it moving like a lollipop," she said. "It's up to you."

    Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny
camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that
would relay images to the mouthpiece.

    I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It
didn't feel bad, actually -- like licking the leads on a really weak
9-volt battery. [...] I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to
avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to
give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I
don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during
my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of
cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes.
Tyler's group hasn't done the brain imaging studies to figure out why
this is so -- they don't know whether my visual cortex was processing
the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing
the work.

The author also has a blog about this stuff:

http://www.sunnybains.com/blog