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  WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY

  WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY

  How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time

  Kara Platoni

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Kara Platoni

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Milenda Lee

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951053

  ISBN: 978-0-465-08997-0 (HC)

  ISBN: 978-0-465-07375-7 (EB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my parents, with all my thanks.

  And to the wild type and the knockout mouse, with all my hope.

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE The Five Senses

  ONE

  Taste

  TWO

  Smell

  THREE

  Vision

  FOUR

  Hearing

  FIVE

  Touch

  PART TWO Metasensory Perception

  SIX

  Time

  SEVEN

  Pain

  EIGHT

  Emotion

  PART THREE Hacking Perception

  NINE

  Virtual Reality

  TEN

  Augmented Reality

  ELEVEN

  New Senses

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, and the denizens of Grindhouse are going to RadioShack.

  They cut odd figures in this suburban Pennsylvania shopping center, where the harsh fluorescent lights expose them as basement-dwelling creatures. Wiry, pale, bespectacled, these underground engineers are founding members of the biohacker group Grindhouse Wetware. But Tim Cannon and Shawn Sarver are also minor celebrities around here, partly thanks to many late-night forays to this very electronics outfitter, and partly because of how much of its inventory is lodged in Cannon’s arm.

  The minute they walk inside the building, the guy at the mobile phone kiosk eagerly waves them over so he can check out their latest project: a thermal-sensing implant buried in Cannon’s lower arm. The implant is a silicone-encased slab about the size of a deck of cards, and it lights up like a Christmas tree. You definitely can’t buy anything quite like this at the mall.

  Grinders are biohackers who build body-modifying, or “body-modding,” gear in an effort to enhance human experience. Tonight they need parts for building an implant to put in Sarver’s hand. They envision a star-shaped insert that will glow brighter whenever he faces north, turning his hand into a kind of compass. This, they hope, will endow him with a not-quite-innate, but still improved, ability to gauge direction.

  “Do we need anything else?” Cannon asks, sifting through drawers of electronic components, bits and pieces to modulate the flow of current. “We’ve got resistors by the dozen.”

  “Yeah, we have plenty of resistors,” agrees Sarver. They call to each other across the aisles as they browse for parts to add to their stash of lab supplies. Jumper wires? They can always use more. Circuit boards? Sure. Piezo transducer? “Excellent,” says Sarver.

  Once the grinders have bagged their wares, they stop at a diner where they onboard many fluid ounces of the nerd fuel of choice, Mountain Dew, and get ready to head down to their basement. There, they’ll see if they can Frankenstein themselves a new sensory experience.

  Grindhouse members are, to put it mildly, underwhelmed by the perceptual apparatus that comes with the standard-issue human body. They see the relative dearth of sensory ports open to us—only five: taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch—as a problem to solve. And even these five have their limits. Why can’t we catch up to our colleagues in the animal kingdom and sense the polarization, or directional patterns, of sunlight, the way some bats, birds, and bugs do? Or feel electricity like sharks can? Or pick up ultraviolet wavelengths like the lowly mantis shrimp?

  Grinders are the electrical engineering arm of an exploratory community of citizen scientists more broadly known as biohackers. Although computer hackers have a bad reputation for malice or sabotage, biohackers use “hack” in the positive sense of a helpful trick or fix, and I’m going to follow their lead. Biohackers are interested in the organic world, rather than the silicon one of computers. Thanks to the easy availability of genetic engineering information on the Internet and the falling price of lab technology, some biohackers are tinkering with the DNA of plants and bacteria, a practice known as DIYbio, or “do-it-yourself biology.” Others try to upgrade their bodies with specialized diets, nutritional supplements, and wearable biometric gadgets that help them track and optimize their sleep, workouts, energy levels, or brain fitness. And grinders: They hack themselves. They are part of a body-modding community that goes well beyond decorative tattoos and piercings. The most ambitious among them are trying to outfit themselves with new machineries of sensory perception.

  But whatever their method, biohackers are driven by an urge to create, to enhance, to supersede the ordinary. Nature is amazing, they readily concede, but couldn’t it be more so? As Cannon puts it midway through his third Mountain Dew: “Why not mess with the body?”

  The grinders’ explorations are fueled by a steadily boiling, if perfectly affable, impatience: impatience with the weaknesses and limitations of the basic human unit; with the slow pace of evolution; with the unwillingness of major research corporations to develop—and sell—the kind of sci-fi sensory apparatus that biohackers desire to keep things moving along. Their inspiration—and the grinder name—hails from Warren Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless graphic novels. The series, which began in 2007, portrays a hardscrabble underground populated by body modders: Shrieky Girls who share a sense of touch through networked devices buried inside fake teeth and fingernails. People who instant message each other via their contact lenses. Couples with palm implants that let them feel their beloved’s heart beating in their hand. Doktor Sleepless is a mad scientist (of course) who, through late-night radio, exhorts the grinders to invent a future no one else will. “You can rebuild your own fucking bodies at home with stuff you bought from the hardware store,” he urges them. “You’re grinders. While you wait for the real future you think you’re owed, you fuck around with your bodies like they were virtual-world avatars. You add things to them. You make them better. You treat them like characters to be improved and you grind them.” Grindhouse’s mantra is also borrowed from the series: “Where’s my fucking jet pack?” It’s a cri de coeur born of out of frustration with a future that, so far, looks a lot like the past.

  And so they’re trying to hurry up a better future for perception. Grindhouse denizens have implanted magnets in their fingertips in a bid to sense electromagnetic fields. They developed a device that works with these magnets to create a kind of sonar that gauges the distance of nearby ob
jects. The lump in Cannon’s arm is a first stab at reading out internal health metrics; if it works, this implant will monitor his temperature. Up next on the Grindhouse wish list is an in-hand compass, a voluntary mutation for anyone who’s ever envied a homing pigeon.

  Their basic gambit is something like this: Open up your flesh, install a device, and see if it can talk to your nervous system. If it can, you’ve broadened your sensory world without waiting for slow, clunky evolution to do it for you.

  The Grindhouse guys are attempting to leapfrog evolution in their own distinctively homebrew fashion, equipped with the cheapest gear imaginable. But they are also part of a much larger effort to explore one of the most fundamental mysteries of human experience: perception. These explorers hail from a variety of scientific disciplines, and nearly all of them require a great deal more credentialing and safety gear than Grindhouse does. They’re academics, entrepreneurs, doctors, and engineers. But they’re all gripped by the same questions: How much do we know about what happens in our minds as we interface with the outside world? Could we perceive more than we do now? Even if there are hard limits on the brain’s perceptual powers, can we work within them to enhance or alter the ways we sense the world?

  The world of sensory science is wide and deep. Thousands of people are pursuing similar questions, even if their pursuits are guided by competing theories and motivations. Some are working to restore what is considered “normal” functionality to those without it—whether that means helping the blind see, the deaf hear, or the paralyzed touch. Others want to push past these concepts of normal; they are looking for ways to change or augment sensation through new therapies or wearable devices. And some simply want to know more about how the sensory system—receptors, nerves, and brain—works together to make the world feel real.

  I’ve been a reporter for nearly two decades, a science reporter for most of that. But when I began this project, sensory science was, to me, mostly new terrain. I’d previously covered the work of only six of the more than 100 people we’ll meet in this book. Still, I found the vastness of the seemingly straightforward question the field confronts irresistible. Could reality be bigger?

  So I took a year off from my teaching gig at UC Berkeley’s journalism school and followed the first rule of our craft: Get out there. I sofa-surfed my way through four countries and eight states by posting my itinerary on Facebook, staying with friends, relatives, and fellow journalists who generously opened their homes to a disheveled roving reporter. I haunted the labs, offices, and operating rooms of anyone in the sensory science world who would let me get in on an experiment or a demo. I wore through four tape recorders, 37 notebooks, three rental cars, countless batteries, and one couch, the armrest of which basically eroded under my sneakered feet as I typed and typed and typed up my interview notes. I met neuroscientists, engineers, psychologists, geneticists, surgeons, piercers, transhumanists, futurists, ethicists, designers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, chefs, picklers, and perfumers. I didn’t have a grand theory to prove or a particular endpoint in sight; my plan was just to listen and to observe the people who occupy this world. But after a while I began to feel the logic and shape of the terrain. Specific themes kept bubbling up, refrains followed me from interview to interview, and once-disparate-seeming ideas began to click together, usually when I was sequestered in someone’s lab, midchew or midsniff or stumbling around in the darkness wearing some kind of weird helmet.

  By far the most important thing I learned is this: There is no single, universal experience of “reality,” no objective portrait of the world we collectively share. There is only perception: what seems real to you. A percept is the technical name for a mental impression, a sensation, an experience. But a percept isn’t reality, any more than an image in a mirror is reality. It’s a reflection of the thing, not the thing itself. And as we all know, a reflection can be warped.

  That’s because the brain is actually a lonely device, an electrochemical jelly cocooned within your cranium, with few ways to interact directly with what’s outside. The senses are its go-betweens with the external world, and the information they pass on is always mediated. You can think of the sensory side of the nervous system as its input channels. Scientists call the neurons along this path afferent; they carry information to the brain. The system also has output channels, efferent neurons, which carry instructions away from the central nervous system—the spinal column and the brain. These outbound channels are the system’s motor side, controlling reaction and movement.

  Nerves in the sensory tissues—the tongue, nose, eyes, ears, and skin—belong to what’s called the peripheral nervous system. This is where receptors, or sensory nerve endings, on or near the body’s surface detect chemicals and environmental energies like light or sound waves or pressure. They kick off the process of transducing, or translating, them into brain-ready electrical signals, which the nerves carry. These signals are then collected and integrated by the spinal column and the brain. The brain, specifically, is where these ethereal impulses become, to you, tastes, scents, images, noises, and textures. It’s here in the darkened cinema of your skull that the story of your life unspools.

  Which isn’t to say that this story is necessarily true. The brain reads only electrical impulses, and is completely indifferent to their source, which is why we can have perceptual experiences that feel perfectly real even if they aren’t. Electrically stimulating the occipital lobe, which processes vision, can create the illusion of a flash of light. Amputees can feel tingling in limbs they have lost. You can taste decadent cakes in your dreams and wake up chewing nothing.

  It isn’t the whole story, either. Your senses take in an unimaginably vast amount of information, much more than you can use. To avoid information overload and maintain a coherent plotline, compression and editing are vital. As we’ll see in just a bit, the brain’s neural circuitry is continually making executive decisions about how to allocate attention and categorize experiences without your conscious say-so. It must. You’d never get through this book if you had to give a thumbs up to each of the many neurons devoted to figuring out, say, where the black letters on this page end and where the white space behind them begins. Time would seem hopelessly jumbled if your brain didn’t retroactively edit to make sure that sound and picture always sync, even though hearing is actually faster than sight. Everything would be gibberish if your brain didn’t know how to sort noises into words, light and shadow into shapes, and tastes and smells into recognizable categories.

  The fact that everyone’s machinery filters the incoming world a little differently, sometimes even picking up on data points that elude others, is why there’s no one reality. Some of this variation is strictly genetic; there’s no question that genes set the limits of our perceptual worlds. Michael Tordoff is a researcher with Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center; we’ll meet him properly in Chapter 1, as one of the leaders in the hunt for a sixth taste, a percept beyond the known five: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. One day as we were eating lunch, he blew my mind with the news that cats can’t taste sweetness. “If you give them a bowl of sugar and a bowl of water, they’ll treat them as if they were both water,” he said. Like people and other mammals, cats have the gene for a sweet receptor, but theirs is mutated so it can’t make a functional receptor. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, Tordoff said, because why would a carnivore need to taste sugar? Sea lions, he added, have an even more limited taste world. “They don’t naturally chew their food—they swallow it straight away,” he pointed out. “What’s the point of having a taste for that?

  Even within a species, Tordoff continued, researchers find a good deal of variation. Think about color blindness—about 8 percent of Caucasian men have red–green vision defects, and have trouble seeing or telling apart different shades. Or consider the gene that controls the bitter receptor that affects one’s ability to taste a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide (better known as PTC). About 70 percent of people carry at lea
st one variant of the gene that makes them sensitive in some degree to PTC, but others can’t taste it at all. Research has suggested this genetic difference might be responsible for people’s divergent reactions to the tastes of tobacco, tea, and astringent vegetables like cabbage and broccoli, which contain similar compounds. So while you may find broccoli to be delicious and green, your neighbor might experience it as bitter and … well, ungreen. As Tordoff put it, “Each animal lives in its own sensory world, and we live in our own sensory world, too.”

  But your brain’s ability to filter—to know which bits of information from life’s perpetual data storm to attend to and which to ignore—is a product not only of nature, but of culture, too. Attention can be modified, and that’s not purely a function of modern technology. We’ve been doing it all along. We’ll see this in what follows as I move back and forth between what I’m calling the “soft biohacking” of social and cultural forces and the “hard biohacking” of technology. By soft biohacking, I mean the ways we unconsciously learn to pay attention to key sensory information about other people and our surroundings. We experience these soft biohacking forces passively, absorbing them over a lifetime. Among them are language, culture, and routine formative experiences, like the foods we eat, the names we learn for ordinary things, and how the people around us behave and reinforce our own behavior. These teach us what is salient and how to categorize, name, and recall our sensory experiences. Our past experiences frame what we expect the sensory world to be like in the future—and, in so doing, they guide our attention, causing us to dwell on some stimuli while ignoring the rest.

  We’ll see soft biohacking at work in Chapter 1, as we set out to keep pace with the forerunners in the search for a sixth taste. One of the most confounding puzzles for taste researchers is the word problem of trying to describe a sixth percept that is distinct from the other five. How are you going to find a new taste, if you don’t have the language—and therefore the mental construct—for what you’re looking for? To be even more blunt: Do you need a word in order to grok a percept? Or do you need that mental concept before you can invent the word?