David Eagleman

And then I'll mention in 1969,

Another scientist put blind people into a modified dental chair, which had this little grid on the back and it would sort of poke you in the back in various ways.

And he set up a video camera and whatever the video camera was seeing, you would feel that poked into your back.

So if it was a face or a square or a coffee cup or a telephone, you'd feel the shape of that poked into your back.

And blind people got really good at being able to see the world this way.

And so it turns out it doesn't matter how you get the information in there.

The brain will say, oh, I got it.

That's correlated with something out there that's useful.

And I'll figure out how to perceive it.

Yeah.

So I got interested in my lab many years ago about this question of could we make sensory substitution for people who are deaf?

Could we feed in the information that would normally be going to the ears to

via a different channel.

And there are actually 212 different reasons you can go deaf genetically.

And most of these are not, you know, something that you can do anything about at the moment.

So what I did first is I built a vest

with vibratory motors on it.

And the vest captures sound and turns that into patterns of vibration on the skin.

So sound is broken up from high to low frequency, which is exactly what your inner ear is doing.

And then that's going, you know, on your skin and up your spinal cord and into your brain.