What do magnetic waves look like?

A magnetic compass embedded in the brain,
allows living beings to gain another kind of "vision"

DailyTechInfo based on Gizmodo: A Magnetic Brain Implant Lets Blind Rats See Without SeeingSo is vision necessary if a special magnetic compass is implanted in the brain of a living being?

The answer to this question was given by neuroscientists from Japan, who manufactured an implant containing a solid-state compass chip, the same as the chips used in smartphones, and introduced this implant into the brain of a blind rat, connecting it to the areas of the cerebral cortex responsible for processing visual information. Naturally, this implant did not restore the animal's vision, it gave him some strange new perception of the environment – a visual perception of the surrounding geomagnetism. And such a method can become a new way to gain a lot of new additional feelings of people who are eager for it.

The electrodes embedded in the brain gave the animal the ability to perceive the direction in a visual form. The direction to the north stimulated the right visual cortex, and the direction to the south stimulated the left. Thus, the animal was literally able to see the direction.

Diagram from an article in the journal Current Biology: Hiroaki Norimoto, Yuji Ikegaya,
Visual Cortical Prosthesis with a Geomagnetic Compass Restores Spatial Navigation in Blind Rats – VM.

At first, this ability completely disoriented the animal, but after 60 training sessions conducted for two days in the test maze, blind animals could already compete in the speed of its passage with normal animals with vision. But as soon as the scientists turned off the implant, the animals immediately lost all their newly acquired abilities and skills.

This experiment once again demonstrates that the brain is a surprisingly flexible biological computer that can quickly adapt to receiving, processing and using information of absolutely any new kind. Such implants, equipped with appropriate sensors and connected to various parts of the brain, will allow living beings to gain a lot of new feelings, for example, the sensation of light, but not at the visual level, but at the level of tactile sensations, i.e. living beings will be able to literally feel the touch of light.

"We dream that in the future people will be able to expand the ranges of their senses with the help of artificial sensors. They will be able to feel geomagnetism, ultraviolet light, radio waves, ultrasound and many other things that are still beyond the capabilities of human senses," says Yuji Ikegaya, a neuroscientist from the University of Tokyo, Japan, "Having gained new abilities to feel, people will be able to acquire new skills useful in certain areas of activity. In addition, such people with expanded sets of feelings will be able to find completely new ways of communication and interaction."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru06.04.2015