Kara Platoni: Transforming Perception, One Sense at a Time

Kara Platoni, author and journalism professor at UC-Berkeley, set out to find the sensory pioneers who are changing the way we experience the world. Her boot-strapped and crowd-sourced quest led her to laboratories and workshops around the world. In her book _[We Have The Technology](http://www.amazon.com/Have-Technology-Biohackers-Physicians-Transforming/dp/0465089976)_ she reports back from the intersection of curiosity, science and technology. Her book goes beyond the five basic senses to examine more complex perceptual amalgams: time, pain and emotion. After that she explores technological extensions like virtual and augemented reality. And finally her book looks at those who are searching for new or latent human senses; adventurous members of our species possessed by a kind of manifest destiny of perception. As we humans have narrowed the places to explore on our planet, it turns out there is still more mysteries to probe within ourselves. In her Interval talk Platoni discussed the search for a sixth basic taste (the current five are: sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami). A variety of theories exist as to what other taste has that primary nature, and she gave our audience a chance to try one candidate on their own tongues when she passed around strips of fat for all to sample. Exploring the extremes, she closed her talk discussing new senses, an area that borders on the transhuman and includes surgically embedding magnets and other devices which may give human additional capabilities. During a lively Q&A;, Kara also tells us about her Virtual Reality research. She spent time in US Army and Stanford University VR Labs where she had some beyond human experiences. So the night ended with the suggestion that empathy, applying our senses to the experience of others, was an additional frontier that is being explored.