Two freaky tech stories I ran across: I posted a link to a story about a neural interface located on the tongue back in 2002; I found it interesting because in this embarassing Cyberpunk story I wrote eons ago, I’d figured this was a pretty kinky place to put a neural interface. But it turns out it’s not kinky, it’s very practical: according to a CNN story linked to by jwz, this device, called a Brain Port, is going to hit the market pretty soon, both to help people with disabilities get around and to enhance the sensory capabilities of divers and soliders in the battlefield.
What is kinky is this other story he links to, a Guardian article about PT-141, a fast-acting, odorless drug delivered by nasal inhaler that induces measurable sexual arousal within 15 minutes, by directly affecting the brain. Very creepy stuff.
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2 replies on “Brains, Tongues, Loins”
Just to make things clear: this tongue thingy, as cool as it is, is not any more a neural interface than the screen in front of me. It uses the tongue’s excellent tactition (is that even a word?) and the brain’s ability to rewire itself and connect specific sensory data to a specific perception of “reality” on the subconscious level (does the name Pavlov ring a bell?)
In that way it is even cooler than a direct neural interface (i.e. metal wires sticking into nerves) as it solves the problem on the software level while using existing hardware.
I.
You can think of the metal wires sticking into nerves idea as trying to connect to a computer by gluing strange new transistors onto it’s motherboard, or getting onto the network by splicing ethernet cables; the tongue thingie is more like “there’s a perfectly decent IO port over there, let’s plug it into that”.