> These findings confirm that people can genuinely sense an object before physical contact
So, it’s just touch, relayed through grains of sand.
Less clickbaity title: Humans have 'remote' touch like sandpipers, research shows
The surprising part was that we can interpret slight differences in touch to locate something buried shallowly in sand, which is interesting enough without the clickbait.
I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning.
Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess the size and other features of things by sound without seeing them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.
That seems like a very strong claim against the paper’s results. What makes you think that the study participants located the cube with reasoning, rather than unthinking sense?
I think we can be too quick to write things off as somehow coming from conscious thought when they bypass that part of our minds entirely. I don’t form sentences with a rational use of grammar. I don’t determine how heavy something is by reasoning about its weight before I pick it up. There is something much more interesting happening cognitively in these cases that we shouldn’t dismiss.
I still wonder how we practiced finding things by distinguishing the fluidity of a medium around them. Maybe playing in water?
Home page with videos, and links to papers and github.
> Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media (Arxiv) [1]
Damn paywalls, when the material is available from the authors, and in much greater detail.
Not only can I do the same, I can also sense the contents of my work email without reading it.
Very specifically, I can sense it's going to be related to jam packing LLMs into any and every @#$&ing thing we work on because AI.
Phasic, tonic and phasic-tonic senses is a cool deep dive.
Cthulhu_•3mo ago