I have read about a rare neurological condition called synaesthia or something like that. There was an article about it recently in Scientific American. Anyway, it is basically a confusion of sense experience(eg. a color could be experienced as a particular musical note.) Considering this phenomenon forced me to realize that the everyday world we experience is only a subjective interpretation of an objective reality. Perceiving vibration as sound is no more inherently true than perceiving vibration as a picture.

This made me think that one sense can be substituted for another. For example, I thought that the blind might benefit from a device that translates a picture from a camera into sound. So I was delighted and fascinated when I read on the BBC website about just such a device being developed. The particulars of the software algorithm is beyond my experience, so I am glad that someone more able has accomplished it.

But the basic concept offers several other possibilities to aid the sense-impaired. One simple possibility to help the deaf would look similar to a pair of eyeglasses. There would be two microphones at the bits about the ears, and the two glass lenses would display the waveforms of these sounds (presumably in a corner of the lens so that it would not disrupt overall sight.)I believe these 'hearing glasses' could be cheaply and easily developed. It is important to remember that persons deprived of one sense neurologically shift the unused brain space to the use of the other operational senses, thus increasing their acuity in these other senses. There is also a hypothesis that someone regularly using such a device may eventually experience the information subjectively as others normally do, through a slow neural adaptation.

Do you have any other ideas for devices of this sort?

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