Enhancing the Senses (minor RAR!)

[Guardsman Bass]

This is kind of a spin-off from the "Intelligent Re-Designing" Thread, but if you could heavily enhance one of the other four human senses (smell, taste, hearing, or touch), which would you pick?

Although I am not sure of how to identify an extreme capability in the area of touch or taste, we have bats (who can echolocate using the sound they throw out), and bloodhounds (who can track a specific scent unique to a person or creature over long distances, and identify drugs hidden within a room) as possible standards for superb hearing and smell.

As for the ramnifications, I think either hearing or smell would be the best, particularly at alleviating fears. It seems like it would be harder to be terrified by the dark when you can identify what's out there by smell, or harder to be surprised if you can hear the heartbeat of the enemy that's sneaking up on you.

[Guardsman Bass]

Crap; it cut off my "touch" option.

[Duckie]

Hearing, undoubtedly. Humanity uses hearing nearly as much as we use sight for everyday living. Hell, that's why Scentlessness would be a minor disability but deafness isn't.

[Simmon]

Smell: Enhanced smell would also allow you to smell various unpleasant smells.

Taste: Great if you like what you are eating, but what if you eat somthing bad?

Hearing: Enhanced hearing will probably get you deaf if you are exposed to loud noise.

Touch: At the range this sense is used, you can use your other sensory organs to help. Also, enhanced touch will probably cause you to become irritated easier (your skin is more sensitive) I would imagine this would also bring about increased pain.

The human body is a delicately balanced system. I say don't mess with it.

[wolveraptor]

Taste seems like a largely useless sense to enhance, unless you were intent on making sure you weren't poisoned. Smell seems more useful, but only for tracking or discovery, for which we do have other tools. Hearing seems like the best for espionage or just for communication.

Hearing: Enhanced hearing will probably get you deaf if you are exposed to loud noise.

Which is why all dogs go deaf after prolonged exposure to cities. Oh wait....

[TheBlackCat]

I would say smell wouldn't be very useful to a human. Dogs have a great sense of smell, but they have to put their nose right up to something in order to use it. Their heads are close to the ground so that is practical, but it really isn't for a human whose head is very far from the ground.

Taste: Great if you like what you are eating, but what if you eat somthing bad?

Taste is really just to tell you whether something is desirable to eat or not. Sweet detects sugar, umami detects protein, salt detects electrolytes, all things you want. Sour detects acids, while bitter is just a general poison detector. I don't think we really need it any more sophisticated than we already have it. If it triggers a negative taste response, it is probably bad for you anyway. Now what we generally consider taste is really due to our sense of smell and the texture of the food more than to what our taste buds actually sense.

Hearing: Enhanced hearing will probably get you deaf if you are exposed to loud noise.

Not necessarily. Naturally, if all you did was change the tuning of the stereocilia so they were displaced more for the same stimulus, the sound level at which they break off and stop working would be lower. However, like all senses the hearing system is designed to compensate for the background level of noise in order to allow comfortable sensing in loud environments. Some of this is due to changes in the ion channels in the stereocilia, this would not prevent them from breaking off.

However, the bones of the middle ear, the incus, malleous, and stapes, have muscles that tense in response to loud sounds. This actively reduces the amount of sound reaching the inner ear. Normally damaging sounds, like the sound of the cannon firing inside a tank, can be brought down to safe levels for the ear by giving the ear a loud but not damaging sound just before the damaging sound occurs. This causes the muscles to tense and reduces the amount of energy reaching the inner ear (they actually used this technique in tanks to prevent the crew from going deaf).

A simple improvement is so that under normal conditions the muscles in the middle ear have a medium level of tension on them instead of very little. Under loud conditions naturally the tension would increase. However, since there is already some tension in the muscles and thus some reduction in hearing at normal levels, when the environment is very quiet or you are straining to hear something the muscles can relax and improve your hearing. Naturally the inner ear would have to have its sensetivity increased so that the nnew, reduced normal sensetivity could be heard just as well as it is now.

Touch: At the range this sense is used, you can use your other sensory organs to help.

Touch is very useful when you can't see, when you want to pay attention to something when your other senses are directed elsewhere, or when you want determine the nature of something that simple visual inspection can't determine. Although people don't think about it much, touch is one of the most important senses. It gives us a huge amount of information about the world that the other senses can't, and works in a number of situations where the other senses can't. A large part of the brain is and spinal column is devoted to handling sensory input, far more than hearing, taste, or smell.

Also, enhanced touch will probably cause you to become irritated easier (your skin is more sensitive) I would imagine this would also bring about increased pain.

Noxious stimuli like pain and irritation are handled by a completely seperate pathway than other touch-related senses. In fact, there are 7 seperate mechanical touch senses, 2 temperature touch senses, at least 3 pain senses, 3 muscle tension senses, a joint angle sense, and probably some others I am forgetting. Each is completely seperate up until the cortex, and many stay seperate even in the primary somatosensory cortex. They have completely different distributions, there is no reason that increasing any one of these would increase any other.

The human body is a delicately balanced system. I say don't mess with it.

You would be surpirsed. There is a very large amount of room for improvement of the human body in a number of ways, senses are no exception.


As for my choice, I would pick hearing. Taste is really not a big deal, it works well enough for its role (telling whether something is safe to eat or not). Improving smell would not be all that helpful to an organism whose head is so far from the ground. Our vision is very good as it is, one of the better visual systems in the animal kingdom. It may not be able to do some things as well as other animals, but it is an extremely good all-purpose vision system. The acuity is good enough that I do not think improving it would seriously benefit us in our current society. Hearing, however, has a lot of room for improvement and we could be seriously helped by an improved lower threshold for hearing. It is useful both in open spaces as well as urban environments (smell is not very useful when there isn't much wind, that is probably why our jungle-dwelling ancestors lost so much of it in the first place). I think that would be the best choice.

[Sriad]

Quick reply: Spider Robinson had a world where the end of civilization as we know it was caused by some sort of plague that incresed mankind's sense of smell by several thousand times, causing the deaths of billions.

Think it's unlikely?

Imagine living in a someone else's gasoline soaked armpit 24-7...

[TheBlackCat]

Besides pain, all senses automatically adapt to the baseline level of stimulus. If you increase the stimulus, you will sense the increase temporarily but either the sense receptors, the brain, or both will adjust to the new level of stimulus. So if you increase the sense of smell by 1000 times, you would sense smell very well for a brief period of time but it would still fade away as your brain and odor receptors get used to it.

[Simmon]

There was also another story of the sort, don't remember the author, but in that one they simply took away nasal congestion and everyone REALLY started to smell.

[Broomstick]

If hearing could be enhanced not only in sensitivity but also in processing to the point that humans could echolocate, I'd vote for that. It would be a good back up to vision, among other things, so blindness wouldn't be so disabling.

[Cos Dashit]

I hate to bring up this example; what about that Daredevil character? He was completely blind and had an acute hearing capability that enabled him to perform better than the average person.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Quick reply: Spider Robinson had a world where the end of civilization as we know it was caused by some sort of plague that incresed mankind's sense of smell by several thousand times, causing the deaths of billions.

Think it's unlikely?

Imagine living in a someone else's gasoline soaked armpit 24-7...

Telempath; everyone aquired a sense of smell "a thousand times" better than a wolf's.

[Guardsman Bass]

If hearing could be enhanced not only in sensitivity but also in processing to the point that humans could echolocate, I'd vote for that. It would be a good back up to vision, among other things, so blindness wouldn't be so disabling.

Interestingly enough, it has already been tried and been successful for some people. There's actually a wikipedia article here that explains about it. Now imagine that with vastly stronger and better hearing; learned echolocation could nearly replace lost sight for blind people.

[Guardsman Bass]

I hate to bring up this example; what about that Daredevil character? He was completely blind and had an acute hearing capability that enabled him to perform better than the average person.

Although he was a comic character, human echolocation has already been tried, and a few people have apparently learned at least part of it (see the wikipedia article I linked to above). With vastly superior hearing, you might get a few people who could get around Daredevil style (although his hearing was so good that he practically didn't need sight.)

[Cykeisme]

I'd say sight.

Some folks have said you'd be harder to sneak up on in the dark if you had more acute hearing or smell, but if you were capable of seeing clearly in low-light conditions, enhanced sight would do even better.

Also, simply having more sensitive hearing doesn't automatically give a creature echolocation. You'd simply be able to hear things better. Echolocation requires specifically designed parts of the brain to process the sensory input and turn it into spatial information.

[wolveraptor]

There's a reason sight wasn't included in the original post: it's fucking obvious. Humans are visual animals -- that's the first sense we seek to improve.