[FRIAM] T & P channels

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Fascinating!   I haven't been able/inclined to follow the literature
closely in Piezos and the implications for proprioception and  inertial
sensations for years.   When I started in VR work, almost nothing was
known about pressure/touch and even less about proprioception/inertial
sensations.  Vision, sound, touch, even olfaction   had decades of
understanding at the sensor level and well beyond.  Space medicine had a
small handle on some things, being able to and needing to study the
human body outside of the internal stresses from gravity.

I found this fairly good summary of the topic circa 2017... I think they
say that piezo1/piezo2 were discovered in 2010.   Fast moving field!

    https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(17)30083-0.pdf

I have mild synaesthesia which is part of what has fascinated me with
VR... the most eerie experiences in VR environments I have had were
associated with this.   I remember acutely walking into the heart of a
simulated stellar core floating in space in the LANL CAVE circa 2004...
the first time I did it, the false-color encoding was on the warm end of
the spectrum (yellow through red) and while it was fascinating to "feel"
the sheer and even coriolis forces implied by being *visually* (only)
immersed in the evolving, spinning "particles".   The second time was
hugely different as the researcher doing the work wanted to look at a
different set of physical properties that were encoded in the cooler
range (green-violet) and as soon as I stepped into the volume that the
star was filling and the particles were "flowing past me", I felt, and
even *smelled* a strong impression of cool moisture.   I know/knew it
was entirely synaesthetic and/or my higher cognition imposing on my
lower sensory functions a model fit.  My eyes told me I was in a "cool
mist" and by golly my skin and sinuses decided it was easier to just
agree with that rather than argue the point.   For weeks, whenever I had
the opportunity to show someone this model in the CAVE I would watch
them closely to see if they had a similar (un-prompted) experience.   I
never saw anyone else do what I did, which was to pause, reach out and
"feel" the mist on my forearms, and then breathe in (through my nose)
the "cool particles".    When prompted ("do you feel a cool mist?") a
few would offer a mild (polite?) acknowledgement, but most were opaque
to the experience I had.   I also experimented with adjusting the color
palette and found that once sensitized (prompted, expecting, etc.) that
I could "feel" the warm particles as well, especially when shifting from
the "cool" spectrum to the "warm" end.   I guessed that this difference
was primarily due to a scarcity of real world precedent in the warm,
similar to a "cool mist"... maybe people in equatorial regions
experience a "warm rain" similar to my "cool mist" but I've never had
the pleasure.

What is your stake/interest in the sensorium?

- Steve

On 5/28/20 6:43 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience
> http://kavliprize.org/prizes-and-laureates/prizes/2020-kavli-prize-neuroscience
>
>> The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for 2020 to
>>
>> David Julius
>> University of California, San Francisco, US
>>
>> Ardem Patapoutian
>> Scripps Research, La Jolla, US
>>
>> “for their transformative discovery of receptors for temperature and pressure.”
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