David Eagleman

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 via a different channel?

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

And most of these are not 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 on your skin and up your spinal cord and into your brain.

And deaf people could learn how to hear this way.

So I gave a talk on this at TED, and then I spun this out from my lab as a company called Neosensory, and we ended up shrinking the vest down to a wristband.

And the wristband does the same thing.

It's capturing sound, and it's turning that into patterns of vibration on the skin, and deaf people can come to understand the auditory world around them.

Like, oh, that's somebody calling my name.

That's the doorbell.

That's a baby crying.

That's a dog barking, things like that.