Re: Sensory modalities and the possibility of semi-arbitrary additions

From: Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly (rainbow@beautywood.org)
Date: Fri Nov 04 2005 - 10:25:53 MST


On Fri, 4 Nov 2005 09:59:15 -0500, Stuart, Ian <Ian.Stuart@woolpert.com>
wrote:

> I don't seem to be using my sense of smell very often . . .

The sense of smell is actually tremendously important to being human, or
being any animal. It's fundamental. The thing is, it's considerably less
conscious than the other senses. Your emotional state right now has a lot
to do with what you are smelling right now, even if there's no smell
that's strong enough to get your attention.

I don't think that means that using smell as a conduit for electronic
information would be a bad idea. On the contrary, once we start to make
use of smell in creating our virtual worlds we will finally feel at home
in them in a very deep way.

I'm not sure I agree with the premises of this conversation, though. Why
would we need to put more I/O on the human brain at this point? That
doesn't seem like the bottleneck to me. Humans have hardly anything else
except I/O. Declarative memory, that's a bottleneck.

<3,
mungojelly



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