Neuroscientist David Eagleman demonstrates a tactile vest that converts sound into vibrations on the skin, letting deaf people perceive audio. The vest costs under $1,000, far cheaper than cochlear implants, and shows how the brain can learn to process entirely new sensory inputs.
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I think that all the particular sensors we have for electromagnetic radiation and air compression waves and molecules floating in the air and so on, I think these are all plug-and-play receptors and that the brain is sort of a general computational device. And you can plug whatever you want in here and the brain will just figure out what to do with it. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find all kinds of weird and interesting peripheral devices that are plugged into animals, whether that's heat pits or magnetites so they can align to the magnetic field of the Earth or electroreception or any kind of thing that, like the star-nosed mole has this nose with 22 fingers on it that it feels around and constructs a 3-dimensional model and so on. You've got all these different peripheral devices. And so the thing that got me really interested a while ago was this issue of, Can we build new peripherals? Can we build a new sort of thing where we're plugging information into the human brain via an unusual channel? So one of the things that we did in my lab, you probably know about this, of course, is we built this vest. I actually brought a demo along here so I could show you guys. We built this vest where I can capture sound. So as I'm speaking, this is picking up what I'm saying. And then what I do is I— wear this vest that picks up all the— Most speakers keep their clothes on. Yeah, not this one. By the end of the talk, it'll be the full Monty. Anyway, yeah, so what's going on is the sound is getting picked up and translated into patterns of vibration on my body. Each of these are vibratory motors. And so what's happening is as I speak, the sound is getting captured and turned into patterns of vibration. And deaf people can come to understand the world this way. And they can come to hear the world through patterns of vibration on their torso. And so this is, you know, if it sounds wacky, it's essentially like the way a blind person can read a Braille novel and, you know, cry and laugh based on the information coming through their fingertip, right? So it's the same sort of thing. Essentially, we're taking the inner ear, the cochlea, and putting it on the torso. And the part that's been of great interest to me is, you know, There are 53 million deaf people in the world who are severely or profoundly deaf, and so we can just cure that now for under $1,000. Whereas the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, which is $100,000 and an invasive surgery. So this is something that's going to change the whole world.
