Compass sense

Northpaw compass anklet

North Paw compass anklet is a transhumanist hack to augment your sense of direction.




I can imagine this being squeezed into a discrete little anklet on the order of a rubber band.

As a Google Glass app this would still be useful, but not as much. As the blurb says, it would be "an intellectual knowledge as with a regular compass."

The difference is in the very unusual form factor - a band around your ankle whose only output channel is where on your body it is vibrating. As you rotate in one direction the location of the vibration rotates in the opposite direction. You'd stop paying conscious attention to this pretty quickly, leaving you with a strange new "compass" sense.

Compass sense already exists in nature - it is called biomagnetism. This works by having cell-sized chains of magnetite, the stuff that makes compasses work. Magnetite has also been found in animals that navigate by compass direction, such as bees, birds, and fish.

magnetite chains in the brain
Single Magnetite Crystal in the Human Brain

We should (but don't) have this sense already, because humans have magnetite chains as well:

Magnetite has also been found in animals that navigate by compass direction, such as bees, birds, and fish, but scientists do not know why the magnetite is present in humans, only that it is there.

It’s not just birds, bees, and fish, but also ancient Martians.

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One Response to “Compass sense”

  1. Sensory augmentation roundup — Lucas Gonze's blog

    [...] Compass sense [...]

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