The Secret Necessity Senario - The Monkey With the Third Arm

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The brain is flexible enough to adapt to a circumstance where i have not just replaced limbs and things like that, but i have new ones. There needs to be some way for me to get the noral impulses to these extra limbs. And then, of course, ah, what would it be like to add new senses? Could we add a new sense? It's very difficult to imagine what a new sense would feel like. But so what we did in my lab is we built a vibratory motor which can feed any kind of data all over it,. So people can come up with their own ideas about how they want to look or behave as if they were another person.

Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what’s outside. Seems scary and limited, but that’s essentially the situation that our brains find themselves in — locked in our skulls, with only the limited information from a few unreliable sensory modalities to tell them what’s going on inside. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in how the brain processes that sensory input, and also how we might train it to learn completely new ways of accessing the outside world, with important ramifications for virtual reality and novel brain/computer interface techniques.

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David Eagleman received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds sensory-augmentation devices, as well as an adjunct professor at Stanford. His research has involved time perception, synesthesia, and sensory substitution. He is the founder and director of the Center for Science and Law. He is a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. He was the writer and host of the TV show The Brain with David Eagleman, and writer of the Netflix documentary The Creative Brain. His most recent book is Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain.