i see you

I was intrigued, recently, to learn of a relatively new technology used by the US Navy. Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition have designed a device called a 'brain port' to simulate the neurons of a sensory transduction pathway. Instead of synapsing on interneurons etc, however, this system uses a specialized network of electrodes connected to the tongue. The device was pioneered by Dr. Bach-y-Rita at the University of Wisconsin.

The 'brain port' is connected to the tongue through a red plastic strip, implanted with 144 electrodes which can be used to transmit signals from any number of sensors. This setup has been used extremely effectively with patients who have vestibular system damage due to antibiotics. Without treatment, they are unable to walk and balance themselves correctly. However, with the brain port and an appropriate gyroscopic sensor they are able to walk and balance themselves effectively. Patients are able to use the sensory input through the tongue with practice in very short order.

The US Navy has similarly been testing devices aimed at giving special operations soldiers 'superhuman' powers. One program seeks to adapt the brain port system to allow Navy SEALs to interface with sonar devices. Through the brain port, Navy SEALs have been able to use sonar detection through the nerves of their tongue, identifying shapes and object in dark water. This is remarkable to me because I find it fascinating that the brain can so quickly adapt to new sensory input through the nerve cells in the tongue. That this information could be interpreted meaningfully is even more amazing - as no evolutionary adaptation exists for navigating via echolocation. This way of 'hearing' one's environment may become more commonplace as technological augmentations to the human body become more commonplace.

es muß sein

When I envision beauty, its visual aspect comes first to mind. Whether in a face, a canvas by Kandinsky, or the elegant pine divides of a Sierran landscape, beauty's first words to me were color, form, texture and space. Sight is vitally tied to the aesthetic - though the pleasure we derive from a painting or a place can be almost ineffable. Of course, some spaces succeed by walking the edge of the sublime - daring us to gaze into scenes beyond the human scale. The feeling can be similarly transcendental. Even so, the most mundane of sights can strike a syzygy of elements. Meaning, too, can be conveyed easily and semiotically through vision. The hammer and the sickle convey different meanings to each of us, tempered by what we have seen. As a sign, it stands for an ideology, and a bleak history.

Sound, however, is a different matter. While we might not say that the sound of a car's engine conveys any particular emotion, it is much harder to say this for a piece of music, say Puccini's Nessun Dorma. It has long fascinated me that ordered sounds could predictably convey emotions from the composer to the audience. Music is distinct from mere sound by virtue of its ability to move us to some end; it seems to cause us to feel beyond our cognitive interpretation of the sounds and convey a state of emotion. I recently encountered a philosophical view of this in Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful. Hanslick attributes the aesthetic significance of music, the ‘ideal content’, to form and technique alone: "... as the creation of a thinking and feeling mind, a musical composition has in a high degree the capability to be itself full of ideality and feeling. This ideal content we demand of every musical artwork. It is to be found only in the tone-structure itself, however, and not in any other aspect of the work (31)". I agree that the structure of a work of music might indeed reflect a great deal of feeling as the functional product of a mind, or set of tendencies, intent on expressing a certain thematic element, whether emotional or purely technical. The ideal composer is skilled at creating music which we, as fellow humans, will respond to with a certain degree of congruity. This can be intended in the composition. Of course, different people will respond to the same expression in many ways, as has been proven.

In listening to music, we travel backward from a complex work, deciphering the various sensibilities (whether feigned or expressive) of its composition. If it maps to an emotion, then we may be moved by the music. The question of why we are likely to apply these tendencies and experience the emotional state ourselves is a complicated one, but I suspect that it involves a natural human desire to connect and to express empathy. While our aesthetic ideals may be primarily visual, our ability to produce sound makes it a more immediate means for communication. I believe that each piece of music has a fingerprint of its creation encoded within its structure; whether it is an intentional or emotional state, the music can convey emotion as a set of perceived tendencies to the listener—this is what we feel.