编者按：人类有听觉、视觉、触觉、味觉、嗅觉五种感官。近年来，科学家正在研究把人类的感官维度进一步扩大的可能性，而本文就是对目前相关成果的一个全面介绍。本文编译自《大西洋月刊》原题为“Beyond the Five Senses”的文章。

The world we experience is not the real world. It’sa mental construction, filtered through our physical senses. Which raises the question: How would our world change if we had new and different senses? Could they expand our universe?

我们所体验的世界并不是真实的世界。这是一种通过我们身体感官过滤过的精神构建。这也引发了一个问题：如果我们有新的，不同的感觉，我们的世界将被如何改变？它们能扩大我们的宇宙吗？

Technology has long been used to help people who have lost, or were born without, one of the five primary senses. More recently, researchers in the emerging field of “sensory enhancement” have begun developing tools to give people additional senses—ones that imitate those of other animals, or that add capabilities nature never imagined. Here’s how such devices could work, and how they might change what it means to be human.

长期以来，技术一直被用来帮助那些后天失去或先天丧失感官的人们。最近，研究人员又开始在“增强感官”的新兴领域跃跃欲试，他们力图给人类开发出一种额外的感官工具- 模仿其他动物的感官，或增加生命中尚不具备的功能。现在，让我们就这些设备是怎样工作的，以及它们将如何改变人类，做一简要介绍。

1 | 听力图片 Hearing Pictures

For decades, some deaf people have worn cochlear implants, which use electrode arrays to stimulate the auditory nerve inside the ear. Researchers are working on other technologies that could restore sight or touch to those who lack it. For the blind, cameras could trigger electrodes on the retina, on the optic nerve, or in the brain. For the paralyzed or people with prosthetic limbs, pressure pads on real or robotic hands could send touch feedback to the brain or to nerves in the arm.

几十年来，一些聋人佩戴着，使用电极阵列来刺激耳内听觉神经的人工耳蜗。研究人员正在研究可以帮助残疾人士恢复视力或触觉的技术。对于盲人，摄像机可以触发在视网膜，视神经或大脑中的电极。对于瘫痪或装假肢的人，通过真人或机器人手上的压力垫可以给大脑或手臂的神经发出触摸回馈。

Autistic people might even gain a stronger social sense. Last year, MIT researchers revealed the EQ-Radio, a device that bounces signals off people to detect their heart rate and breathing patterns. A yet-to-be-invented device might infer a target’s mood from those data and convey it to an autistic user—or anyone who wants to improve their emotional intuition.

自闭症患者甚至能获得更强的社会意识。去年，据麻省理工学院研究人员透露，EQ-Radio是一种能反映人类心率和呼吸模式的设备。 这是一个尚待发明的设备，它可能会从一些数据中推断出目标的情绪，并将其传递给自闭症用户，或是任何想要改善直觉情绪的人。

We can also substitute one sense for another. The brain is surprisingly adept at taking advantage of any pertinent information it receives, and can be trained to, for instance, “hear” images or “feel” sound. For the blind, a device called the BrainPort V100connects a camera on a pair of glasses to a grid of electrodes on a person’s tongue. At first the effect just feels like tiny bubbles, but eventually users can learn to read stronger points of stimulation as bright pixels and weaker points as dark ones, and can form a mental picture.

我们也可以用一种感官来替代另一种感官。通过训练， 大脑会奇妙地利用其接收的任何相关信息，完成“听到”图像或“感觉”声音的任务。 对于盲人，一种被称为BrainPort V100的设备将一副眼镜上的相机连接到人舌头的电极上。 起初的效果只是感觉像是微小的气泡，但最终，用户可以学会把较强的刺激点看作是亮的像素，而弱一点的刺激则被当作是黑暗，以此来形成一个心里画面。

Somewhat similarly, a Dutch device called the vOICe (“Oh I see!”) uses a camera to create a soundscape that the vision-impaired wearer hears through headphones. To the uninitiated it sounds like bursts of static, but with training, people can discern images. Every second or so, the sound pans from left to right, using frequency to indicate an object’s height (the taller the object, the higher the pitch) and volume to indicate its brightness.

与此类似，一种被称为vOICe的荷兰设备（“哦我看到了”）使用相机创建出一个视障患者能够通过耳机听到音响风景的效果。 对于外行的人来说，它听起来像是打破了静态，但是通过训练，人们可以用它来辨别图像。 每隔一秒左右，声音从左到右上下移动，使用频率来指示物体的高度（物体越高，斜度越高)，利用音量以指示其亮度。