Tactile Vision

Tactile Vision Experiments

In 1969, “Nature”, Europe's premier science journal, published a short article that had a distinctly sci-fi feel about it. Its lead author, Paul Bach-y-Rita, was both a basic scientist and a rehabilitation physician – a rare combination. The described a device that enabled people who had been blind from birth to see. All had damaged retinas and had been considered completely untreatable.

The “Nature” article was reported in “The New York Times”, “Newsweek”, and “Life”, but perhaps because the claim seemed so implausible, the device and its inventor soon slipped into relative obscurity.

Accompanying the article was a picture of a bizarre-looking machine – a large old dentist's chair with a vibrating back, a tangle of wires, and bulky computers. The whole contraption, made of castaway parts combined with 1960s electronics, weighed four hundred pounds.

A congenitally blind person – someone who had never had any experience of sight – sat in the chaire, behind a large camera the size of those used in television studios at the time. He “scanned” a scene in front of him by turning hand cranks to move the camera, which sent electrical signals of the image to a computer that processed them. Then the electrical signals were conveyed to four hundred vibrating stimulators, arranged in rows on a metal plate attached to the inside of the chair back, so the stimulators rested against the blind subject's skin. The stimulators functioned like pixels vibrating for the dark part of a scene and holding still for the brighter shades.

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This “tactile-vision device,” as it was called, enabled blinded subjects to read, make out faces and shadows, and distinguish which objects were closer and which father away. It allowed them to discover perspective and observe how objects seem to change shape depending upon the angle from which they were viewed. The six subjects of the experiment learned to recognize such objects as a telephone, even when it was partially obscured by a vase. This being the 1960s, they even learned to recognize a picture of the anorexic supermodel Twiggy.

Everyone who used the relatively clunky tactile-vision device had a remarkable perceptual experience, as they wen from having tactile sensations to “seeing” people and objects.

With a little practice, the blind subjects began to experience the space in from of them as three-dimensional, even though the information entered from the two-dimensional array on their backs. If someone threw a ball toward the camera, the subject would automatically jump back to duck it. If the plate of vibrating stimulators was moved from their backs to their abdomens, subjects still accurately perceived the scene as happening in front of the camera. It tickled near the stimulators, they didn't confuse the tickle with a visual stimulus. Their mental perceptual experience took place not on the skin surface but in the world. And their perceptions were complex. With practice, subjects could move the camera around ans say things like “That's Betty; she is wearing her hair down today and does not have her glasses on; her mouth is open, and she is moving her right hand from her left side to the back of her head.”

True, the resolution was often poor, but as Bach-y-Rita would explain, vision doesn't have to be perfect to be vision. “When we walk down a foggy street and see the outline of a buildings,” he would ask, “are we seeing it any less for the lack of resolution? When we see something in black and white, are we not seeing it for lack of color?”

(The Brain that Changes Itself, Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science), by Norman Doidge, M.D.)

“When we walk down a foggy street and see the outline of a buildings, are we seeing it any less for the lack of resolution?". Illustration by Elena.

Epic Myth

Epic Myth

In the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generations of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form the planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth.

Congealing and warming, it released the ammonia, methane, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the oceans.

Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the atmosphere; the fragments fell back together again into more and more complex forms, which dissolved in the early oceans.

After a time the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clays. And one day a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth.

As time passed, more elaborate self-replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self-replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun.

Single-celled plants evolved, and life began to generate its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free-living forms banded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell.

One-celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that the land could support life.

Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through the steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born life instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early oceans coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They become upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At en ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years or more of cosmic evolution.

It has the sound of epic myth, and rightly. But it is simply a description of cosmic evolution as revealed by the science of our time. We are difficult to come by and a danger to ourselves. But any account of cosmic evolution makes it clear that all the creatures of the Earth, the latest manufactures of the galactic hydrogen industry, are beings to be cherished. Elsewhere there may be other equally astonishing transmutations of matter, so wistfully we listen for a humming in the sky.

By Carl Sagan.

We have broadened the circle of those we love. Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

The mental life or real human beings is the traditional subject matter of psychoanalysis. We have said that it has recently become a legitimate subject matter for neuroscience too. In other words, we now have two disciplines (perhaps better described as two loose groups of disciplines) studying the same thing. But they approach this shared subject matter from completely different points of view.

The “subjective” approach to mental science (psychoanalysis) split off from the “objective” approach (the neurosciences) just over a hundred years ago. Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895) or his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) provide useful milestones in this divergence. Since then, each approach has developed along its own path. The original reasons for the split were complex. Mainly it was a matter of expedience. It was not possible to learn anything useful about the mind – the real mind – using the neuroscientific methods that were available at that time. Neuroscience could not (at that time) penetrate the mysteries of personality, motivation, emotion – the things that make us who we are – and it therefore seemed to Sigmund Freud that the most useful way to study, understand, and treat the disorders of the human subject was from a purely psychological perspective.

We do not wish to be excessively optimistic, but the reason that a book such as this one can be written today is because that situation has changed. We have powerful new methods and technologies in neuroscience that are yielding previously undreamed-of knowledge about the physiological underpinnings of the “inner world.” In short, neuroscience has caught up with – many would say overtaken – psychoanalysis as a science of the human subject, and today it is possible to learn some very important and valuable things about inner experience by studying the physical organ that was damaged.

Attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, tic disorders, panic attacks, an so on are very complicated topics. Photo by Elena.

Reconciling the two approaches

It is essential for us to find some way of bridging this historical divide, and perhaps healing the rift, between these two different approaches to mental science. Neuroscientists – who are grappling with the complexities of human subjectivity for the first time – have much to learn from a century of psychoanalytic inquiry. Psychotherapists, for their part, have an opportunity to benefit from the enormous empirical advances in the neurosciences and, as a result, to make progress in their own disciplines, where scientific progress has become frustratingly slow. Psychoanalysis today is associated with bitter rivalry between opposing camps that apparently have no valid means of deciding between their conflicting standpoints on various theoretical matters. One solution might be to find links links between the disputed theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis and those of the neurosciences.

This seems to be an appropriate way to proceed, but it is quite difficult to put into effect. There are a number of things that have to be done for us to be able to bridge the gulf that separates these two approaches. Each side has (for various reasons) regarded the other with suspicion and disdain for over a hundred years. Typically, neuroscientists have regarded psychoanalysis and related disciplines as “unscientific” (how can a science of subjectivity be objective?” Psychotherapists, for their part, have regarded the neurosciences (including biological psychiatry) as symplistic, to the extent of excluding the psyche. These attitudes have developed for good reasons, and they will not be overcome easily or quickly.

In addition, there are serious scientific problems to grapple with. How can we link these disciplines in a methodologically valid way? To take a concrete question, how do we set about identifying the neurological basis of something like, say, “repression”? How does one go about testing experimentally, from the neurobiological point of view, whether such a thing as repression even exists? Repression – if it exists – is a complicated, elusive, fleeting phenomenon. It is far from easy to capture such things in physiological terms.

If such problems are to be overcome effectively, a good deal of the effort required would have to be put in by members of both of the approaches working together. To do this, we would have to have interdisciplinary dialogues and research about topics of common interest. We would need to collaborate  on clinical material and work together on the same cases, or on examples of the same disorders, to learn from each other's approaches. But first of all, before we can realistically combine them, we need to learn about each other's different perspectives.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

To what extent are the trajectories of our lives predetermined by our genes? Photo by Elena.

Cosmology

Cosmology

Eventually we would discover the nature of other civilizations. There would be many of them, each composed of organisms astonishingly different from anything on the Earth.

Each one of these civilizations would view the surrounding universe somewhat differently. They would be interested in things we never thought of. They would have different social functions and culture.  By comparing our knowledge with theirs, we would grow immeasurably. And with our newly acquired information sorted into a computer memory, we would be able to see which sort of civilization lived where in the Galaxy.

Imagine a huge galactic computer, a repository, more or less up-to-date, of information on the nature and activities of all the civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, a great library of life in the Cosmos. Perhaps among the contents of the Encyclopaedia Galactica will be a set of summaries of such civilizations, the information enigmatic, tantalizing, evocative – even after we succeed in translating it.

Taking as much time as we wished, we would decide to reply. We would transmit some information about ourselves – may be just the basic at first – as the start of a long interstellar dialogue which we would begin but which, because of the vast distances of interstellar space and the finite velocity of light, would be continued by our remote descendants. And someday, on a planet of some far distant star, a being very different from any of us would request a printout from the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica and acquire a little information about the newest society to join the community of galactic civilizations.

Any account of cosmic evolution makes it clear that all the creature of the galaxies, are beings to be cherished. Image © Megan Jorgensen.

Technical Civilizations

Technical Civilizations

We define an advanced technical civilization as one capable of radio astronomy. This is, of course, a parochial definition because there may be countless worlds on which the inhabitants are accomplished telepaths or superb botanists but indifferent radio astronomers. We will not hear from them.

But it is possible to explore the great issue and make a crude estimate of the number of advanced technical civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. We should take many factors into consideration if we try to determine how many of them are there in deep space: the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy; the fraction of stars that have planetary systems; the number of planets in a given system that are ecologically suitable for life; the fraction of otherwise suitable planets on which life actually arises; the fraction of inhabited planets on which an intelligent form of life evolves; the fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings on which a communicative technical civilization develops; the fraction of a planetary lifetime graced by a technical civilization. We must not forget about evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, abnormal psychology, politics, history and many other factors.

Written out, an equation exists which defines a value and to derive it we must estimate each of these quantities. We know a fair amount about the early factors in the equation, the numbers of stars and planetary systems. We know very little about the later factors, concerning the evolution of intelligence or the lifetime of technical societies. In these cases our estimates will be little better than guesses.

Anyone can make his or her own choices and see what implications their alternative suggestions have for the number of advanced civilizations in our Galaxy (the very first equation is due to Frank Drake of Cornell).

By now, we know the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, fairly well, by careful counts of stars in small but representative regions of the sky. It is a few hundred billion. Very few of these stars are of the massive short-lived variety that squander their reserves of thermonuclear fuel.  The great majority have lifetimes of billions or more years in which they are shining stably, providing a suitable energy source for the origin and evolution of life on nearby planets.

There may be a billion planets on which technical civilizations now exist only in our Galaxy. Image © Megan Jorgensen.