Can you taste calcium just as you taste sweet and salt? Could we make a robotic hand that can feel the warmth of human skin? Can individual cells tell time? How do our senses affect how we remember and learn? In her first book, We Have the Technology, journalist Kara Platoni explores the colorful, fast-developing world of sensory science with engaging clarity and wit. For one year, she traveled to interview--and experience the work of--researchers who use technology and training to expand understanding of the senses and restore damaged sensory abilities or create new ones. There is no such thing as objective reality, she writes; our brains constantly filter and edit our experiences, and imagine what isn't there. We limit ourselves further by perceiving only "what we have learned to pay attention to--through words, through cultural associations, through personal memories." But the brain will also "learn to read whatever we can learn to write in."
Platoni visits a man with a bionic eye, and a French group that treats memory loss with fragrances. One lab examines the neurological similarities between physical and emotional pain, another creates pictures from thoughts. She learns how virtual reality can teach her to operate a third arm or empathize with a cow. Amateur "biohackers" augment their bodies with wearable gadgets or modify them with electronic and magnetic implants, eager to "Frankenstein themselves a new sensory experience." These experiments have intriguing implications for the future, at least for a privileged few. "Nature is amazing, say the biohackers.... Couldn't it be more so?" --Sara Catterall