z Knowledge Seminar Essay

Can we create senses for humans?

Instructor - Dr. (Lt Col) S.N. Prasad

Date – 15th March 2021

Prepared by: Aniket Das

PGDM number: 20129

1|Page
 Table of Contents

Introduction...........................................................................................................................................1
Purpose and Context of the speech.......................................................................................................2
Purpose............................................................................................................................................2
Occasion...........................................................................................................................................2
Subject..............................................................................................................................................2
Audience..........................................................................................................................................2
About the Speaker.................................................................................................................................3
1. Sensory substitution...................................................................................................................3
2. Perception of time.......................................................................................................................4
3. Synesthesia..................................................................................................................................4
4. Illusions of vision........................................................................................................................4
5. The law of neuroscience.............................................................................................................4
Awards and honours.....................................................................................................................5
Contents of The Speech.........................................................................................................................5
Related topics which are current and relevant in today’s environment..............................................10
Level of importance of the issues covered in the speech to an executive...........................................12
Analysis of the speech.........................................................................................................................14
Messages Conveyed.....................................................................................................................14
Managerial Learning..................................................................................................................15
Critiques about the speech..........................................................................................................15
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................16

2|Page
 Introduction

When we think about humans hundred years from now, we imagine about our
species becoming more smarter and technology oriented. Every instance of our life
will be filled with numerous technological gadgets. At the same time with the help of
our technology we would like to become more functional and try to go beyond our
capabilities. To reach to that level we have to infuse tech within our body. There
comes the idea given by David Eagle man in his speech where he tried to find a way
to expand our senses and experience a reality we never imagined existed. We will
realise the world we see and feel now is only just a fraction of what is really present.
Technology is at is peek now and in future it will keep on rising and help us
experience things we have never imagined before. Our brain cannot hear or see any
of the things of the natural world. All it ever sees are the electrochemical signals that
come in along different data cables and that is all it has to work with and nothing
more. Amazingly our brain is really good at taking these signals and extracting
patters and assigning meaning so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a
story of our subjective world. Interestingly our brain doesn’t care where it gets the
data from. David Eagleman used sensory substitution for deaf in his lab.

Over the years we have evolved and our sensory organs evolved but we don’t have
to stick to it. Through sensory substitution we can expand this. We will come across
an idea which has a great potential to change how humans feel and experience the
reality of the world today. The more research explores these unseen pathways, the
clearer it becomes that our brains are designed to sense a surprisingly tiny fraction
of the surrounding truth. Our sensorium is sufficient for life in our ecosystem, but it
cannot estimate the broader picture.

3|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
 Purpose and Context of the speech
Purpose
The speech's main goal is to demonstrate how humans can expand their senses.
"Intelligence isn't all about being good at math and science; it's about being able to
use the whole mind's dynamic capacity." He shows that technology needs to improve
in order to keep up with the evolving and growing world and society. Technology also
has the power to make us experience things that we never imagined before.

Occasion
The speech was first given at a TED conference in 2015. It is one of the most
famous TED talks of all time. People who talk at TED are people who change the
world by inventing world-changing devices and making ground-breaking journalism.
This speech is full of creative thinking about human brain. " We can expand our
senses and the reality we see is just a fraction of the actual one that is present in
universe" was the main emphasis.

Subject
“Expanding human senses through technology”

Our brain has a unique ability to figure out on its own with signals coming from
technologically advanced sensory organs.

Sensory Substitution has given a hope to convert the vision into reality.

The topic is outlined distinctly in the speech and is brought up on a regular basis.

Audience
The public consists of a diverse community of people, with the bulk of them being
web viewers. Many business professionals, supervisors, instructors, and educators
who are interested in the subject were present. The aim of the speech is to prove his
point of view and provide sensory substitution a new dimension. The speech was
delivered to a live audience via TED exclusive broadcast.

4|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
 About the Speaker

Eagleman was born in New Mexico City. Being a neuroscientist, he taught

neuroscience as a subject at a prominent university. He teaches neuroscience at
Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neo sensory a company that
produces sensory substitution products. He also leads the Centre for Science and
Law, which aims to balance the legal system with scientific neuroscience, and is
Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Brain Check, a digital cognitive wellbeing
network used in medical practices and health systems.

After attending schooling at Albuquerque Academy for high school, he under

graduated from University of Rice. Majored in American literature and British.
Earning his PhD degree in Neuroscience he did a postdoctoral fellowship at Salk
Institute. After serving Chief Science Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, he
became youngest member of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation.

Eagleman has been featured in publications such as New Yorker, Texas Monthly,
and Texas Observer, on pop-culture tv shows such as The Colbert Report, and on
the Nova Science Now scientific programme. Stewart Brand wrote, "David Eagleman
might be the perfect mix of a living scientist and fiction writer." Eagleman created
Death switch, a dead man switch service focused on the Internet, in 2007.

He was against commitment of atheism. He doesn’t believe on any religion. He is

also author of books and also one of the NY times bestselling author. He has also
written and presented many international tv series.

Profiled in some famous magazines and on many science shows, he is not only a
scientist but also a fiction-writer. Some of his famous scientific specializations are as
follows –

1. Sensory substitution
Sensory replacement refers to the provision of input to the brain by unusual sensory
pathways. As of 2020, Neo sensory has raised $16 million in venture capital.
Eagleman's Live wired book explores the past and potential of sensory replacement.
Neo sensory introduced the Buzz wristband, a sensory replacement system that

5|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
converts sound to complex vibration patterns designed for deaf or hard-of-hearing
persons.

2. Perception of time
Eagleman's experimental work incorporates psychophysical, behavioural and
statistical approaches to investigate the relationship between timing of perception
and timing of neural signals. Areas for which it is recognised include time encoding,
time warping, distortion of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-
adrenaline conditions. In one experiment, he lowered himself and everything else.

3. Synaesthesia
It is an irregular perceptual phenomenon in which activation in one sense causes
unintended sensations in other senses. Eagleman is the maker of The Synaesthesia
Battery, a free online test that allows users to decide if they are synthetic.

4. Illusions of vision
Eagleman has published extensively on what visual illusions tell us about
neurobiology, concentrating especially on the flash lag illusion and wagon wheel
effect. Eagleman has written widely on what visual illusions teach us about
neurobiology, focusing in particular on the illusion of flash lag and car wheel effect.

5. The law of neuroscience

It is an emerging field that determines how contemporary brain science will affect the
way we regulate, discipline criminals, and invent new approaches to regenerate.
Eagleman is the founder and director of the Centre for Science and Law.

Eagleman has presented a number of TV shows. He played a variety of roles in

them, including writer and executive, to name a few. In 2018, he made a
documentary on Netflix, The Creative Brain, based on his book The Runaway
Species with Anthony Brandt.

He worked as a science advisor to the Hollywood Box Office TV shows, previously

serving as a science advisor. He's actually published a lot of novels. Eagleman's
book on synaesthesia is a review of current knowledge and studies on this
perceptual disorder. One of his popular books is The Hidden Life of the Brain, which

6|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
is an easy way of writing science that can be understood by a large amount of
people. He even

wrote a book on neuroplasticity.

Awards and honours

 Guggenheim Fellowship
 Science Educator of the Year – Society for Neuroscience

Contents of The Speech

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” - Albert Einstein

When Albert Einstein quoted this many years back, we didn’t recognise the truth behind it at
that time. David Eagleman in his speech told that as humans we are just experiencing only
a fraction of the reality that exists in this universe. We are not able to sense all of that
present in this universe. Now if we look at these examples, we’ll come to know that
yes that bold statement made by David is true. An astronaut cannot feel the overall
health of a space station. We cannot feel the invisible states of our own health like
our blood sugar and the state of our microbiome. Today we live in a world of
information where we can access them rapidly at a very short time scale but there’s
a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it. How amazing it would
be if we can feel it. Can we expand our capability experiencing the unknown things
of this real world? Can we do that with the help of technology? More importantly the
big question is Can we use an artificial sensory organ to sense the unknown things
present in reality those are beyond the scope of human sensory organs like eyes
and ears?

All these questions are answered by David Eagleman in a rational way. He said,
“Our experience of reality is constrained by our biology”. We are just able to see only
a ten trillionth of what’s out there. Just like the colours of our world, we are just able
to see only a ten trillionth of what’s out there. Colours are light waves or in terms of
physics called electromagnetic radiations that bounces off objects and reaches our

7|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
eye and hits the receptors present in retina of our eyes. We are not able to see all of
it. The electromagnetic spectrum ranges from radio waves to gamma rays. But we
are able to see just the visible part of it. We do not complain of it as we haven’t
experienced it ever before. Similarly, we are just able to feel only a ten trillionth of
what’s out there in this universe. As we are not aware of it, we don’t miss it.

We are composed of very small particles and embedded in a very large universe,
and the irony is that we are not very good at interpreting life at any scale because
our minds have not adapted to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we're
stuck in the middle of a really small slice of perception. In our everyday life there may
be numerous electromagnetic waves passing through our body and we are simply
unaware of it. This occurs because we lack the necessary biological receptors to
detect it. Such radiations are no longer inherently invisible. Snakes can detect some
infrared in their truth, honeybees have ultraviolet in their vision of the universe, and
of course, we install machines in our cars' dashboards to pick up on radio frequency
signals, and we build machines in hospitals to pick up on radio frequency signals.

If we explore the animal kingdom, we’ll come across numerous animals like the black
ghost knifefish, the star-nose mole, bats, owl and many others have special
receptors that enable them to view and sense the world in a totally different way than
we do. Consider a bloodhound puppy to get an idea of how much goes unnoticed in
our lives. Its long nose contains 200 million smell receptors. The moist nostrils draw
and capture fragrance molecules on the outside. When it sniffs, the slits at the
corners of each nostril widen out to let further air flow. And the fuzzy ears drag over
the carpet, stirring up aroma molecules. The dog might wonder what is it like to have
the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human being? What can humans possibly detect
when they take in a feeble little nose full of air?

We obviously may not experience a lack of scent and we embrace evidence as it is

portrayed to us. It scarcely happens to us that things might be different if we
possessed the olfactory ability of a bloodhound. We have never experienced the
world of smell so we don’t miss it. We are firmly settled in our umwelt. Umwelt is a
German word for the surrounding world. In the world of the black ghost knifefish, its
sensory world is lavishly coloured by electric fields and for a bat its reality is

8|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
constructed by echoing of ultraviolet waves. Now every animal assumes that its
umwelt is the entire objective reality out there. So, we all accept reality in the way it
is presented to us.

But the big question is do we have to stuck there? Or can we increase our boundary
of umwelt. So, David Eagleman suggested that we can sync technology and biology
together to expand our umwelt. This will change the experience of human being.

The technology has already helped for persons with disability of hearing or seeing.
To overcome it we have to just use a microphone to digitise the signals and connect
it to inner ear. In case of retinal implant, we take a camera and convert it into digital
signals and connect it with optic nerve. Earlier scientists thought these technologies
wouldn’t work. The reason is these technologies communicate with a language that
couldn’t be understood by human brains. They are not same as the natural language
that our human brain processes. But the interesting fact is, it works. Our brain figures
out how to use the signals over time. Initially it might be confusing that how our brain
could understand the signal that they are receiving for the first time. Is there already
something present inside brain that is converting digital signals into language
understandable by brain. The truth is our brain is locked inside an isolated dark
space within our skull. Our brain cannot hear or see any of the things of the natural
world. All it ever sees are the electrochemical signals that come in along different
data cables and that is all it has to work with and nothing more. Amazingly our brain
is really good at taking these signals and extracting patters and assigning meaning
so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of our subjective world.
Interestingly our brain doesn’t care where it gets the data from. It doesn’t matter to
our brain whether the data is coming from our sense organ in our body or through
some artificial device. Whatever information comes in it just figures out what to do
with it. This shows that our brain is a very efficient kind of machine. It’s essentially a
general-purpose computing device. Thus, from this we can say that all our sense
organs like our eyes, our ears or our nose are just merely a plug and play device.

When we look across the animal kingdom, we find a variety of these peripheral
devices. Snakes have hit pits to detect infrared. Then the ghost knifefish has
electroreceptors. The star-nose mole has an appendage with which it feels around

9|Page
PGDM No. - 20129
and constructs a 3D model of the world around it. Also, many birds have magnetite
so they can orient so that they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So, this
means is that nature doesn’t have to continually redesign the brain. Instead with the
principles of the brain operation established, all we have to think about is designing
the new peripherals.

Over the years we have evolved and our sensory organs evolved but we don’t have
to stick to it. Through sensory substitution we can expand this. Sensory substitution
is the process of feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels and
the brain just figures out what to do with it. In 1969 a paper was published in journal
Nature demonstrating this. The journal talks about a scientist who put blind people in
a modified dental chair. He put something in front of a camera and set up a video
feed and the blind persons can feel that at their lower vertebra with the help of a grid
of solenoids. So, if we move a coffee cup or any other thing in front of the camera,
we can feel that in our back.

Amazingly the blind people in that experiment we able to determine accurately for
most of the time what was in the front of the camera. Even today there are many
varieties of that concept. For example, the sonic glasses take a video feed right in
front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape. Initially when these glasses were
given to the blind people, they could only hear a buzzing sound when the object was
moving in front of the glasses. The frequency and amplitude of that buzzing sound
varied as the objects moved around. But over the weeks these blind people started
getting pretty good at it. Then we have another device that is called a brain port that
can be placed in our tongue and this video feed gets turned into these electro tactile
signals and blind people are so good that they can throw a ball into a basket or
navigate through some obstacle courses. So, with the help of this they can see
through their tongue.

David Eagleman used sensory substitution for deaf in his lab. He has undertaken
with a graduate student in his lab Scott Novick who’s spearheading this for his
thesis. They wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some
ways. So that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And to do this given
the power and ubiquity of portable Computing, they wanted to make sure that this

10 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
would run on cell phones and tablets. Also, they wanted to make it wearable so that
anyone could wear under their clothing. The mechanism works like this that as
someone is speaking, his sound is getting captured by any electronic device like a
tablet or cell phone and then it’s getting mapped onto a zest that’s covered in
vibratory Motors just like the motors in your cell phone. So as someone speaks, the
sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest.

Initially, deaf people have trouble determining the vibration pattern, but it was later
learned that after only a brief amount of time, people would start sensing and
interpreting the vest's voice. This is equivalent to a blind person running their finger
over Braille and the meaning shows on the page without any interruption. Since the
only other alternative for deafness is a cochlear implant, which involves invasive
surgery, this device has the ability to be game-changing. This, on the other hand,
can be installed at 40 times the cost of a cochlear implant, making this device
available to all nations, even the poorest. Though there has been encouraging
results with sensory substitution but there’s a lot to think about it. For example, could
real-time data from the internet be fed directly into somebody’s brain and can they
develop a direct perceptual experience?

In another experiment in the lab, the object feels a real-time feed flowing from the
data network for five seconds. Then there are two keys, and he has to make a
decision. He doesn't know what's going on here. He's making a decision, and he's
getting input after a second. The participant has no idea what all trends are. It's just
feedback that tells him whether he did the right thing or not. So, this experiment is an
example of whether we can extend the human environment in such a way that, after
a few weeks of clear visual awareness of the economic movements of the world, it
comes into being.

If the brain is a musical instrument, neuroscientists and neurosurgeons listen more to

the music they play. Through this expanded ability in terms of computational power
and material science, they have a deeper view of the connectome—the wiring
diagram of the brain—to propel us into the next boundaries of neuroscience and to
restore patient function.

11 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
In addition to the haptic jackets that help patients "hear" and "see," Eagleman and
his colleagues go past auditory and vision issues to prosthetic limbs. Currently,
prosthetic leg amputees often have difficulty learning how to walk because there are
no impulses relayed to the brain. Eagleman is developing a way not simply to
replace the senses that have broken in any way.

We're living in a world of knowledge now, and there's a distinction between

accessing and understanding big data. So, there really is no limit to the prospects of
human expansion on the horizon. Only believe that the astronaut will be able to
experience the general wellbeing The International Space Station or, for that matter,
you sense the unseen state of your own wellbeing, such as your blood pressure and
state of microbiome.

We still have a 360-degree vision or infrared or ultraviolet vision. So, the trick to this
is that as we step into the future, we will increasingly be able to select our own
peripheral gadgets. In the end, Eagleman said he hopes that people will be able to
choose their own peripheral devices and form their "environment."

Related topics which are current and relevant in

today’s environment

Enhancing our senses in today’s world is becoming crucial. From many science
fiction movies of past, we have seen that humans always want to become
superhumans capable of performing extraordinary tasks by possessing extraordinary
senses. So just like in the video Eagleman was saying about expanding our umwelt,
in recent times its importance is gaining momentum. Goggles used at night for
military purposes and officers of police has helped them to enhance their vision
across the globe. Hearing aids gave the opportunity the ability to hear. Many insects
and animals can sense about bad weather conditions many hours before we humans
could realise. This happens because we are not equipped with such sensory organs.
Now just imagine if we also could sense about natural disasters few days before its
actual arrival.

12 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
In a world where data is gaining momentum at a scale never imagined before if we
can predict correctly an information from that we could make the right investment
decision every time. Risks will reduce. This is possible if we can expand our senses.
Also, there is a possibility that by expanding our senses we can predict more
accurately our future.

Another instance of expanding our senses may be interchanging our sensory organs
that we usually use to sense. For example, we use nose to smell. However, if by any
means with the advancement of technology if we could smell by our skin then I think
our olfactory nerves could smell even better than dogs as we would be smelling with
the largest organ of our body. As humans we cannot see through our eyes in
complete darkness unlike cats, owls. We are only confined to hearing between 20Hz
to 20000Hz. Any sound frequency below and above that are beyond human audible
range. This is the reason we cannot hear any of the ultrasonic waves that bats
produce. We cannot hear a feeble sound made at ten yards away whereas a dog
can. We do not want to miss all this forever. We also want to experience someday
the sound of a variety of aquatic animals when we dive deep into the sea. Hence
with the help of technology we would definitely try to expand our senses.

With the advent of augmented reality, we would be able to measure distances with
our naked eye, click a snap with the blink of our eye. By the help of sensors, we
could recognise ultra and infra sounds. Electric nose device is another device that
can identify very small substances kept at distant places. These noses will enhance
our smelling capabilities. Birds have a far superior vision compared to humans. They
can view prey in ground from several feet above the ground. The Bionic lenses are
going through research and development to improve the viewing capabilities of
humans. Thus, in a nutshell, expanding our umwelt has not been talked much
earlier. It is still a debated topic. From above we have seen many advantages on
expanding our senses. Although the technical potential of certain sensory
enhancements is very tangible and the first sensory enhancement technologies will
enter the consumer market in just a few years, there is a strong need for discussion
of the regulatory issues involved.

13 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
 Level of importance of the issues covered in the
speech to an executive

The world experienced by humans is not the whole of reality. There are far more out
there in this cosmos than we can feel. An executive can take this as an opportunity
to come up with solution for this totally new dimension.

The most important aspect from the speech of Eagleman is ever increasing
importance of expanding our world of senses. It gave an idea to look at our world
through a totally different perspective. So just like in the video Eagleman was saying
about expanding our umwelt, in recent times its importance is gaining momentum.
Hearing aids gave the opportunity the ability to hear. Many insects and animals can
sense about bad weather conditions many hours before we humans could realise.
This happens because we are not equipped with such sensory organs. If we also
could sense about natural disasters few days before its actual arrival it would have
been exhilarating.

The second most important aspect he talked about is our brain figures automatically
the signals it gets. This is a very important thing stated in the video. This would help
an executive to understand and get away with the popular myth that our brain may
not understand the digital signals.

Initially, deaf people have trouble determining the vibration pattern, but it was later
learned that after only a brief amount of time, people would start sensing and
interpreting the vest's voice. This is analogous to a blind person running their finger
over Braille and the meaning appears on the page without any interruption. Since the
only other alternative for deafness is a cochlear implant, which involves invasive
surgery, this device has the ability to be game-changing. This, on the other hand,
can be installed at 40 times the cost of a cochlear implant, making this device
available to all nations, even the poorest.

We are composed of very small particles and embedded in a very large universe,
and the irony is that we are not very good at interpreting life at any scale because
our minds have not adapted to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we're
stuck in the middle of a really small slice of perception. In our everyday life there may

14 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
be numerous electromagnetic waves passing through our body and we are simply
unaware of it.

Sensory replacement refers to the provision of input to the brain by unusual sensory
pathways. As of 2020, Neo sensory has raised $16 million in venture capital.
Eagleman's Live wired book explores the past and potential of sensory replacement.
Neo sensory introduced the Buzz wristband, a sensory replacement system that
converts sound to complex vibration patterns designed for deaf or hard-of-hearing
persons.

In addition to the haptic jackets that help patients "hear" and "see," Eagleman and
his colleagues go past auditory and vision issues to prosthetic limbs. Currently,
prosthetic leg amputees often have difficulty learning how to walk because there are
no impulses relayed to the brain. Eagleman is developing a way not simply to
replace the senses that have broken in any way.

While creativity has always been at the heart of industry, it has not always been at
the top of management's priority list. Creativity, defined as the desire to develop
something fresh and appropriate, is critical to the ingenuity that brings new firms off
the ground and that keeps the best companies going when they have grown to
global size. But perhaps because it was thought to be unmanageable—too complex

14 | P a g e

and intangible to pin down—or because focusing on it yielded a less immediate

reward than optimizing execution, most managers have not given it much thought.

However, researchers in disciplines ranging from anthropology to neuroscience have

long been interested in creativity, as have management scholars. As a result, any
businessperson willing to take a break from the daily grind and think about
imagination has access to a considerable body of work on the topic. And that's lucky,
because what was once merely a matter of academic curiosity for certain thoughtful
executives has now become a pressing issue for many. The transition to a more
innovative economy has been swift. Execution skills are commonly spread today,

15 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
and new offering life cycles are brief. As competition turns into a game of who can
generate the best and greatest number of ideas.

Analysis of the speech

The speech given by David Eagleman pushes us to think whether we humans need
to be constrained with the limited senses. If there is any way to expand our senses.

Messages Conveyed.
The research done by David Eagleman in the field of sensory substitution conveys
many relevant messages. We came to know that our brain can never recognise our
surrounding. It cannot see any objects. All that it recognises are electromagnetic
impulses that travels through neurons in our brain. Another interesting fact is that our
brain can on its own figure out the signal it receives. This means apart from our
usual sensory organs like nose and ears, our brain can automatically recognise
signals coming from artificial sensory organs. Next, we came across the concept of
Sensory Substitution. For many people this is new concept. It is a technique that
takes over the functions of a compromised sensory organ by feeding input to another
source, normally to another sensory organ. That's why certain blind people are able
to use echolocation to 'sense' their surroundings.

Neuroplasticity is the concept that the brain continually evolves over a person's life.
This means that a brain's neurons can bind and re-connect to other neurons. A vest
that uses the sense of touch to help the deaf 'hear' again is at the centre of
neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman's creation.

Then we came to know about the vest which has mechanised rotors embedded in it.
While listening we can feel it in our body which is quite an interesting thing. For a
deaf man instead of undergoing for a hearing implant, this is a better deal at a much
affordable price. We also came to know that with many other sensors a drone flier
can feel the drone while flying it. In future many such things will be there.

16 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
Managerial Learning
Understanding how we learn and the science behind the brain influences the types
of systems we create, and the conversations we have with our students, our children
and one another.

Sensory substitution is not a completely new thing but Eagleman gave it a totally
new direction. As a founder of a company Eagleman has carved out an opportunity
and he is utilizing this unwanted wish of humans as a problem for which he by
himself is coming up with a solution in the form of a product. He is also drawing
attention bout the product sensory vest by attending various talk shows and TEDx is
one with large audience among them.

Neuroplasticity denotes that we are constantly changing. The hypothesis of

neuroplasticity has replaced the formerly held position that the brain is a
physiologically rigid structure, and it investigates how – and in what ways – the brain
evolves over time. As a result, the ways we learn are increasingly evolving, and the
most important effect could be on digital natives, who are poorly described as
infants.

When you are excited about something, you are at your most advanced stage of
study. Curiosity in something equals the existence of certain chemicals. So, in order
for kids to explore whatever subject you are attempting to educate, it must be
wrapped in a manner that engages and creates interest. Stories and storylines are
often a successful tool for engaging, asking questions, and solving a mystery.

We have also seen how the speech is delivered effectively. The whole presentation
goes in a logical order. He first made the people understand the problem. Then he
made them realise that there is a way with concrete evidence that if they follow, they
can definitely cope up with the problem. Finally, he pushes them into action with the
sensory vest product. So, this is a very good example for a manager to learn making
people believing is someone own idea.

Critiques about the speech

The idea given by Eagleman and way he direction which he wants to show people
sounds amazing but if we delve deep into it, we’ll find out the issues more
importantly the technical feasibility issues relating to it.

17 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
The first being the power source of the artificial sensory devices being connected to
our body is one of the major issues. These sensory things will be on our body. We’ll
be carrying it all the time. The battery will at first put on weight, then it may also
reduce its life in the long run. Then there also may be issues with the moving parts of
the sensory vest. Then the jacket or these devices may be bulky and heavy because
of that. So overall there are still technical design related issues.

Then in the speech it is mentioned that humans can expand senses. This may sound
good but just imagine if your neighbour has developed excellent hearing sensation
after implanting external sensory devices then all your private talks will be easily
listened by your neighbour. Also, may terrorist group organisations if gets this
technology, they will definitely use it in a wrong way.

So just as coin has two sides, the idea and vision stated by Eagleman has lots of
benefits but still at some areas has issues. These are not visible superficially. Only if
you carefully see through this you will get to know about it.

Conclusion

Hence, we have seen that rapid advances in neuroscience have sparked numerous
efforts to study the neural correlate of consciousness. The speech given by David
Eagleman pushes us to think whether we humans need to be constrained with the
limited senses or if there a way to expand our senses. Enhancing our senses in
today’s world is becoming crucial. From many science fiction movies of past, we
have seen that humans in future gradually becomes metahumans capable of
performing extraordinary tasks by possessing extraordinary senses. This may turn
out true in case of real world.

We're living in a world of knowledge now, and there's a distinction between

accessing and understanding big data. So, there really is no limit to the prospects of
human expansion on the horizon. Only believe that the astronaut will be able to
experience the general wellbeing The International Space Station or, for that matter,
you sense the unseen state of your own wellbeing, such as your blood pressure and
state of microbiome.

18 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129
Eagleman’s vision holds great value in the upcoming world. It has also had some
potential threats as already mentioned. The implementation of sensory substitution
also is done correctly but one question that always remains at the back of our mind.
Are we creating a Frankenstein of our own? Now this remains an open-ended
question and the answer of this will gradually be discovered with time.

19 | P a g e
PGDM No. - 20129