Purposely giving people with a sense deficiency Synesthesia is a pretty awesome idea. I'll put this with the sensors that blind people can wear that administers a tiny tiny electrical shock to to their tongue. They then are teaching their brain how to see through an alternate sense organ. This is SCIENCE!
OniaPL said:
Rather than developing this kind of technology, wouldn't it be more effective to dump that cash in something like gene therapy and gene research? Being able to use a vector to put a properly working, dominative allele in the place of one of the recessive alleles that cause achromatopsia (or being able to find the recessive gene and deal with it during the embryo/fetus phase) would be far better than just sticking a machine into someone's head and make them "hear" sounds.
That'd be a future where I'd like to live.
I don't know if this has been addressed already: There is actually so little known about the genome and the epigenetic landscape, it just doesn't make sense not seek out other ways of solving problems. That is what nature did in evolution. Our brains, for instance has many systems that overlap and do the same or similar things. Take our sense of sight for instance, it's the newest sense in the grand scheme of life on this planet. The sense of sight is only about 900 Million years old, and in a lot of ways a lot more powerful than other senses. Olfaction, conversely, is the oldest and has a lot more connections in our brain. Olfaction predates the corpus callosum and is tied to our memory, our perception of the world independent of our phrenological sense of what the brain does and how it handles information. It literally has neurological connection to our brain stem. Unlike our sense of Sight.
But, back to Genes. There is only a handful of conditions out of potentially millions, many of which we don't know even exist (this number is compiled from the nearly uncountable ways a system can break down and perform incorrectly or detrimentally) that have direct genetic links to specific genes. For instance, Sickle Cell Anemia is tied to one or few known gene mutations. In the case of Sickle Cell Anemia, the genetic factor was known years before the human genome project finished what it started. If you were to dump the lions share of all research money into genetic alterations, perhaps designer virus' that can change the function of cell in an already living person (still only really the stuff of modern science fiction), or to research what is wrong with someone before they are born, or even just to understand exactly what can go wrong, we are talking decades of research. People are somewhat misinformed about the state of our understanding of genetics. Really, we probably know 1000th of 1 Percent, if we are lucky. But the media and science magazines, research papers and collegiate science centers give the impression of more than what has been accomplished. Really, the most fantastic things are still to come, some things that I doubt anyone can even imagine at this point in time. It's all very exciting.
That said, it only makes sense for people to research direct ways of helping the afflicted on what is known. It was through the aforementioned idea of giving blind people site by sensor and electrical shock on their tongue or a harness on the back that this idea was probably birthed. Or, it follows the same thought, even if it's not based off of that idea directly. Modern Neuroscience has shown us that the eyes are sense organ and it's the brain itself that sees. This is a logical extension of that very idea.
But, I digress. The subjects of genetics and neuroscience have been the bulk of my reading in recent years. I'm obviously no expert. But I wanted to put my two cents into your comment.
