I was born deaf.
My parents found out when I was five.
I did go through speech therapy.
I can speak some.
Hi.
Like that as an example.
Around 5% of the world's population
is affected by some form of hearing loss.
While hearing aids are helpful for some
they're ineffective or only partially effective
for many deaf people.
And cochlear implants are expensive
and require an invasive surgery.
Recently, inventors around the world have been working on
new ways of letting deaf people experience sound.
Something we don't remember
but all of us had to learn how to use our ears.
So when we were born,
our brains didn't know how to interpret
all these volleys of spikes coming in.
And eventually it became
just the perceptual experience of hearing.
And this is exactly what happens
to people with the wristband.
They start off saying,
"Oh, there's something buzzing on my skin."
And then after a while they simply hear with it.
Baby.
What the brain is really good at doing
is taking in information,
and putting together a story of what's going on out there.
But the surprising part is,
it doesn't care how it gets that information.
So we're used to eyes and ears and nose and mouth
and fingertips and so on.
But it turns out that you can get the information in there
a different way, and the brain will figure it out.
This is what's known as sensory substitution.
So in my neuroscience lab,
we got interested in this topic of sensory substitution
and whether we could do that for people who are deaf.
So we built a vest that has vibratory motors on it.
So this is the vest that we built.
And the vest capture sound and turns that
into patterns of vibration on the skin of the torso.
Sleep.
Work.
And deaf people could get so good at this
that they were able to understand spoken words.
Where.
So, we ended up shrinking that down over time
to a wrist band.
And it's listening to the world
and then it has vibratory motors all down here.
And this is spread in a spectrum
so that you're actually feeling the sounds from low to high.
Which is exactly what your inner ear does.
Your inner ear picks up on sounds of the world
breaks it into low to high frequencies
and ships that off to the brain.
We're doing the same thing
but we've transferred the inner ear to the skin.
So that was the car engine starting.
And I could feel,
I could feel the vibration on my skin of the engine.
And of course, since it's mapped from low to high frequency,
I feel it go up and down.
I feel it spatially
as well as the amplitude of it on my skin.
Phillip was one of our first participants
when we were testing this out some years ago.
And so Phillip actually wore a very early prototype of this
and it was very life-changing too.
They gave me an example of the first product they had.
And I started crying when I first used it.
It was great.
I was able to feel and understand so much stuff
that was happening around me.
I know when I have it on, I do have this connection.
I feel more connected with my family.
I'm able to recognize words
like when they say I love you and things like that.
I'm also able to feel emotion in people's voices.
And I think we should all have that.
Okay, so, Phillip, you ready?
I'm gonna play some sounds
and then you see if you can identify them.
Knocking on the door.
Very good. Here we go.
Oh, dog barking.
Yep.
Oh, that's the car horn.
Yeah, very good.
Oh, yeah, that's definitely the piano.
I love music.
Without this, I'd have to, you turn up music really loud
and put my hands on everything to feel the vibrations.
I don't wanna have to touch everything,
especially with COVID.
But with the wristband, I can feel everything.
Okay, so, now we stepped out into the road
to test the wristband in the wild
and to see if Philip can tell
when there's a car coming down the road.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, let's see if we can hear another one.
Yeah.
This guy is feeling real-time feed of data.
The question that I've been asking as neuroscientist is
can we actually make it so that
we're picking up on different kinds of signals
and experiencing a new kind of reality.
We brought in a blind participant and put the vest on him
and he could tell where everybody was
by feeling where people are around him.
We have 70 other projects in development right now
for feeding in new kinds of senses to people.
So not merely substitution, but addition of senses.
So for example, being able to detect infrared light
or electrical fields or the movement of the stock market
or Twitter sentiment
or what's going on with your drone
as you're flying it around. Where you're actually
feeling the pitch, yaw, roll orientation
and heading of your drone on your skin.
Whatever you plug in, the brain will figure it out.
And it turns out if you plug in new senses,
as long as it's relevant,
the brain will figure out what to do with those senses.
All the information is sitting there
but normally we're blind to it.
And it is possible to take in this kind of information
and add it to our repertoire of what we consider reality.