Also, although this relates to a different post, I’m geekily warmed by the knowledge that someone else remembers that episode of Johnny Quest. Even at the age of 9 I wondered how the villain could send that final transmission through the eye at the very end, when the eye had been quite obviously ripped free of its power source.

Pi-reciting nerds! Very interesting stuff! You know, my (mild) synaesthesia isn’t helpful in the least. Try describing for the record store clerk how the song you’re looking for moved through the air and what color it was. Utterly hopeless. It also renders nearly anything sung by Phil Collins after a certain year as the same pleasant song.

Was Mr. Tammet an inspiration for Blindsight?

YouTube version (5 parts):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss

GoogleVideo version:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662&ei=pQjCSpz0Ap-i2wKb8uXpBg&q=daniel+tammet#

OH HO HOHO HO! If this mirror thing spread like a virus, imagine how incredibly difficult it would be to get a porn film made?

Anyone being filmed causes the director and crew to experience the sensations, and although x percent of orgasm in porn appears fake, some of it is real, so everyone in the studio watching the filming is going to climax every damn time one of the actors/actresses does.

hahaha, so unless you want the world’s soggiest and most exhausted film crew, the crew would have to set the cameras rolling, close their eyes, with the actors under instructions to keep to their marks so they don’t move out of shot, because the cameraman isn’t watching.

Also, if this spread to the population in general? There would be no such thing as not having simultaneous orgasms with the lights on.

Prostitutes would be wrung dry!

Teenagers would cause traffic jams as a prank by ejaculating by the side of the road in view of drivers! (That might cause an accident or two without such a plague, now that I think about it.)

YOU COULD KILL SOMEONE BY CLIMAXING IN THEIR LINE OF SIGHT WHILE THEY WERE OPERATING DANGEROUS MACHINERY. They’d die happy, but it’d still be murder.

I am enjoying this concept way too much.

a) Damn, but I’ve really got to read that woman’s stuff sometime;

Fuck yeah. Something tells me you’d appreciate Doro. In some ways, he makes vampires look cuddly.

b) Yeah, but I bet she didn’t come up with a neurological mechanism for it, did she? Huh? Huh?

Well, it’s a congenital condition brought on by her mother’s drug abuse in the book. I’ll have to dig up the book to see if she mentions mirror touch synaesthesia.

c) Now that she’s dead, maybe the rest of us might have a chance to catch up a bit.

The really nasty thing about Butler’s books is how empathic everyone is. Everyone understands the feelings and motivations of the people around them. The really nasty thing is, that just helps the ones in power to manipulate people better, to keep other people subservient.

Fledgling, her book about vampires was distinctly uncomfortable; the protagonist’s saliva makes slaves of her victims, and both she and her victims are aware of the essential unfairness and cruelty she’s inflicted — but it doesn’t change anything.

I take your point, but the demonizing caracitures are also aimed at abstracting away humanity. After all, how many people actually thought that all Germans looked like mindless brutes and that all Japanese wore coke bottle glasses and had buck teeth (Not the Craw, the Craw!!!!). It was more an easy way to live with yourself after pulling the trigger.

And the sniper problem, why would they necessarily feel the victim’s pain there? A head shot is probably one of the least painful ways to go, and it’s not like one could really imagine what that would feel like anyway. Would the sniper just get a splitting headache?

As for this being applied to pleasure rather than pain (or both if that’s what you’re into) wouldn’t this make voyeurism a million times more fun? And if a man watching porn orgasms and then watches the guy on camera orgasm too, would the viewer get another orgasm right away?

but there’s no reason you couldn’t have little RF transmitters talking to each other from different parts of the brain— or even through the Internet, for that matter.

Yeah, there’s an idea no one would think to abuse

I seem to remember a couple of papers a while back reporting that experimental rewiring of visual signals into the auditory cortex did produce a functional, sound-seeing system. The catch was that you had to do it early on, before the brain got too set in its ways.

Shows what they know. Check this out: Daniel Kish trains other blind folks to echolocate with tonge clicks. And they don’t even have to be children!

Oh, and to jump on the bandwagon of folks who beat you to the mirror neuron thing … V.S. Ramachandran

And which of the players they’d empathize with.

Heck, theoretically, all of them at once, wouldn’t it have to be, if it were involuntary and just about physical sensation of the skin being recreated in another brain.

OMG, if this condition actually caused the firing of the of skin neurons in reaction to seeing touch in someone else, watching porn could cause you to have an orgasm triggered by your visual system alone.

Wow.

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” also has it, as does a Robert SIlverberg novel (the name of which escapes me for a moment) in which several couples have a swinger’s get-together where they plug into a thing to feel the experience of someone else making love to their wife.

What I don’t understand is, are these MTS people physically experiencing the touch so they would not be able to detect if their arm had been touched or not without looking at their arm, or do they just have really good imagination, so they are bringing up a memory of a sensation of touch? If it’s the former, that is uber-freaky!

When I remember a voice, I am not hearing it, I experience a representation of it, a different experience. If I remembered a voice by actually hearing it as a noise in the room, I would think I had lost my bloody mind.

Anyone here got sound-visual synaesthesia?

It makes one wonder how these folks react to pornography?

And which of the players they’d empathize with.

This might be a wonderful quality for a doctor to possess, not so much for a judge!

Not so much for the doctor, I’d guess, because you’re not feeling the other person’s actual responses. You’re feeling, at best, what you would feel under similar circumstances, which would have very little diagnostic value unless patient and doctor were physiologically identical in the critical area.

Chris J. said:

Sounds like all it would take for humans to enslave vampires is a few mirror neuron tweaks!

Ooh. Cool idea— except that the whole reason we brought vampires back from extinction was to exploit their pattern-matching savantism, and I bet those mirror-neuron tweaks would fuck up their abilities.

I’m a little confused on one thing though: if synaesthesia is just a cross wiring of the visual and auditory centers of the brain, does this mean that other areas of the brain can be spliced together/removed to produce a desired effect? You hinted at this above, but is there a limit on what systems are compatible for cross wiring? Aren’t some parts of the brain responsible for more than one function? So, while you may get a desired effect, would it be at the expense of something else important? Like being able to taste equations, but with a cost of pissing your pants.

I seem to remember a couple of papers a while back reporting that experimental rewiring of visual signals into the auditory cortex did produce a functional, sound-seeing system. The catch was that you had to do it early on, before the brain got too set in its ways. But even that constraint may be looser than we thought; those guys who recently reversed color-blindness in monkeys were told up front by all their neurological buddies that there was absolutely no way that their monkeys would ever gain red-green vision, no matter how well the pigment got established in the cones, because the upstream retinal and visual-processing wiring would have long since “hardened” by then. Lo and behold, the monkeys regained full color vision.

Would all of this (Including the mirror neuron stuff) be achievable with just some well placed electrical shocks from an implant or do you actually need to make a connection between neurons with surgery?

I don’t see why you couldn’t do it any number of ways. Direct neural rewiring would be the most straightforward, of course, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have little RF transmitters talking to each other from different parts of the brain— or even through the Internet, for that matter.

I hope this doesn’t sound too dumb! I don’t know as much about biology as I wish I did!

You and me both. You wouldn’t believe how fast a PhD in biology stale dates these days.

Jesse said:

If I recall correctly, there’s an invention in one of the stories in Stanislaus Lem’s _Cyberiad_ that allows people to feel each other’s pain. It was invented to bring about world peace, and it didn’t work well at all.

Trurl and Klapaucius, right? I remember those guys from way back in high school, but that was decades ago. The memory has faded.

Their schemes did go awry a lot, through. That much I remember.

Tom Tobin said:

… and I’m also an NRA member.

So’s Michael Moore, as I recall. Welcome.

I’ve *never* gotten the impression that NRA members (or gun rights supporters in general) are sadists who *want* to hurt and kill other people for no good reason.

But then Dmart stepped up with:

Uh, Tom? I dunno about the whole lobby vs. industry thing, but as Watts has described this thing, self-defense versus sadism doesn’t really play into it.

…and that pretty much says it. I wasn’t implying that the NRA are sadists at all, merely that they would— for whatever reason— resist measures that reduced the effectiveness of personal weaponry. For once, I was not actually making any kind of value judgment.

Hey, it had to happen sometime…

Val said:

…what kind of evolutionary back-story are you planning for this empathy thing? PETA hipster high-status fetus tweak? ‘Cause it seems pretty maladaptive to me. …

Not thinking in evolutionary terms at all: just an outright engineering hack.

Dmart said:

How would something like this dovetail with intentionally suppressed empathy, like you’ve discussed as a way to make “kill ten to save a thousand” decisions? Surely they’d be incompatible on the individual level.

Probably wouldn’t even come up. The guys who made those decisions would most likely be cocooned away in safe little cubbies surrounded by Markov chains and tactical overlays; they’d never have to deal with the sight of an actual human face.

I smell neuroenhancement caste systems!

Now that I can see as pretty much inevitable. Everybody and their dog would be looking for exemptions on medical or religious grounds, but by and large it’d be the richest applicants who’d be able to afford the effort. And then they could go around punching poor ol’ Alex in the face, knowing Alex would never be able to raise a fist in self-defense.

Why, it could take off as the Next Big Thing amongst the polo-shirt-wearing frat boys of the next generation: “Prole-punching”…

Will Sargent said:

Octavia Butler has an interesting take on it with Parable of the Sower and “hyperempathy.”

And then Squeak rubbed it in with:

Also, Octavia Butler had dibs before you, with Parable of the Sower.

To which my three reactions, in order, would be a) Damn, but I’ve really got to read that woman’s stuff sometime; b) Yeah, but I bet she didn’t come up with a neurological mechanism for it, did she? Huh? Huh?; and c) Now that she’s dead, maybe the rest of us might have a chance to catch up a bit.

Anony mouse said:

…your comment about pixilated images in sniper scopes is something that governments have done in every war. … These were nothing more than propaganda aimed at making everyone, including the soldier, more comfortable with killing the enemy.

True as far as it goes, but we’re actually focusing on the ramifications of enhanced empathy here. And the use of derogatory and demonising caricatures is, I think, somewhat different from our pixel paradigm. One seeks to generate outright hatred; the other, merely to abstract away the humanity.

Granted, the bullet resulting from either approach leaves you just as dead…

Chris in NY said:

A Discovery documentary broken into pieces on YouTube.

Cool. Thank you. I’ve seen a couple of these before.

No, really.

Also, Octavia Butler had dibs before you, with Parable of the Sower.

• Lady who tastes sounds
• Born-blind Turkish painter who understands perspective (previously thought impossible)
• German man who does savantlike math in his head without being autistic
• Man whose body warms him up in extreme cold that would incapacitate/kill us lesser beings