Sensory Deprivation: Not as boring as it sounds

Living in the 21^st century can often feel like being constantly poked with a thousand blunt sticks. The minor (and major) stresses we face every day – noisey neighbours, traffic congestion, the constant stream of pings and vibrations from the small rectangular ball-and-chains we carry around in our pockets – can really where a person down. You may be familiar with the sensation of coming home exhausted at the end of the day in spite of the fact that, physically, all you have done is sit in a chair and stare at a screen. That is because the thousands of little prods your brain gets actually where down its ability to function. Worse, the instinctive stress response our bodies produce when we, for example, get a new project with a tight timeline handed down to us by a manager can lead to high blood pressure, impaired cognitive function and a host of other physical effects that are generally bad news.

It is no wonder then, that new-agey trends like yoga and meditation have surged in popularity over the past decade. We are driven to find ways to escape the sensory overload that is just a normal part of life for so many of us. However, few interventions embody the crystal-healing, aura-cleansing, cringe-inducing pursuit of stress-escapism in the way that the practice of sensory deprivation does.

Any hardcore Simpsons fan ia familiar with the basic concept of sensory deprivation. You lay in a dark, soundproof space, tucked away from any distraction, and experience the novel sensation of nothingness. However, since Homer took his wild ride in a whale egg back in 1999, the practice – and business – has expanded dramatically in North America.

The kind of sensory deprivation you can pay to experience in between lattes takes two main forms: chamber therapy – where the participant lays on a soft, comfortable, dry platform in a dark soundproof room; and floatation therapy – where the participant lays in a space filled with salt-infused, skin-temperature water. The latter is the far more popular variant, and the one we will focus on here.

So what can laying in a tank of water with a thousand pounds of salt dissolved into it for an hour do for you? The benefits listed on the website of the float house in my own neighbourhood range from the plausible: relaxation, meditation, stress relief; to the intriguing: enhanced healing and pain management; to the dubious and downright perplexing: increased immune function, “super-learning” and deautomization (?).

The trouble with vetting these supposed benefits is that the science around the idea at the heart of floatation – restricted environmental stimulation therapy (REST)* – is sparse. Most studies rely on small sample sizes and limited timeframes. However there are a few generally agreed upon benefits including relaxation, meditation, restoration, and consolidation of new information or physical skills. Much like sleeping, float sessions have been linked to improved retention of new information (if you do your floating after your studying) and better performance on tasks requiring practice and coordination (like basketball and jazz saxophone).

In a world where tension is the norm, these benefits – along with the opportunity and implicit permission to relax for an hour – seem reason enough to be open to a dip in brine. However, researchers are quick to point out that these benefits don’t go far beyond those you would experience from relaxing in a dark room and listening to soothing music. That approach may save you the $50 - $100 bucks most float houses charge, but would rob you of an interesting “what I did this weekend” story.

Researchers also caution that a person’s experience in sensory deprivation is highly depended on their expectations. In overwhelmingly negative contexts (ex. prison and war) isolation can be used as a form of torture. The positive effects of floatation, therefore, may be as much a product of walking into a spa with friendly employees and being told you’ll soon experience the soothing sensation of deautomization as it is an actual outcome of the therapy.

The cool aspects of sensory deprivation are the wacky responses your brain produces when deprived of input. We often forget that our brains are basically machines that use stimuli to produce perspective and an image of the world. When you remove light and sound from the equation, hallucinations become very common. They range from seeing points of light and vague shapes to hearing music.

Ultimately, the best approach to take in the face of relaxation options like floatation therapy is best summarized by psychologist Neal Miller and restated by one of the most prominent researchers in the field of REST, Dr. Peter Suedfeld: Be courageous in what we try, cautious in what we claim.

*Fun Fact: REST as a field of study was pioneered in the 50’s by John C. Lilly, a neurophysiologist who would later lead a study in which a woman lived with a dolphin for 10 weeks to see if it could be taught to speak English.

Colour Confusion: What’s the deal with that damn dress?

Welcome to another week of Sketchy Science. We should all be thankful that we can still take these few minutes out of our day to enjoy a slice of knowledge, because there were moments last week when the future of our civilization was in serious doubt. In addition to losing our interstellar voice of reason and logic through the passing of Leonard Nimoy, our society was on the verge of collapse as millions of people argued over the colour of a

dress. Thankfully, science prevailed as we learned once and for all that the dubious garment was in fact blue and black. But how could so many people see the same image so differently? The answer lies in the way our brain interpret colour.

Wired offered a great and much more timely explanation of the mechanism at work than this one, but they don’t have our flare for comics, so what follows is largely based on their explanation with a Sketchy Science twist. The heart of the problem lies in the fact that what we all take as reality is just an interpretation based on our five senses. The three dimensional wonderland we all navigate through in our waking lives is the result of electrical impulses zipping through our brains that make a picture we can use. Some philosophers have even suggested that it is possible that each of us is nothing more than a brain in a vat in the lab of a mad scientists who has us hooked up to strategically placed wires. The really interesting part about that Matrix-eqsue theory is that there is literally nothing anyone can do to prove it wrong.

But back to the dress. Assuming for a minute that we are in fact living breathing, non-wired-up beings and that the image we all saw this week was in fact real, there is a simple (albeit super interesting) explanation for the confusion. The truth is, that what we think of as colour is just our brains’ interpretation of light reflecting off different objects. A universe without light, as anyone who has ever gone spelunking can tell you, is a universe without colour. When you see an object as, for example, red, that object is just absorbing all the wavelengths of light except for red which it reflects back into your eyes. As we all know from elementary school science, normal white light is actually made up of different wavelengths that our brains see as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Interestingly, some people debate whether indigo is actually a colour of the rainbow, but that is another article.

The thing about our brains is that they aren’t always operating in a world of perfect lighting conditions. At twilight, for example there is less light for objects to reflect but our brains still have to see our car is red, lest we commit an accidental felony at the supermarket. To do this, the area of your brain that interprets colour factors in the context in which it is seeing an object. Though this works in most situations, it is possible for mistakes to occur. The internet is loaded with examples of optical illusions where two identically coloured shapes are presented against different coloured backgrounds and the effect is that they look like two totally different shades.

That is basically what is happening with this dress. You look at the image and your brain has to decide whether to discount the blue end or the gold end of what is called the “chromatic bias of the daylight axis.” Basically, it needs to decide whether it is seeing a blue dress in good lighting conditions or a white dress in poor lighting. If you see the dress as white and gold, your brain is discounting the blue end of the light spectrum. If you see the dress as blue and black, your brain is (correctly) discounting the gold in the visible light. To make things even more confusing, your brain can change its mind as so many people (myself included) found out when they loaded an image of a white and gold dress that gradually turned blue and black.

So as it turns out if you suspected the work of a crafty troll when you first saw the dress, you were spot on. However, rather than sitting in a dark basement in the anywhereville, USA the trickster was inside your own head. Yet another reason to question everything.

Sketchy Fact #82: Foot for thought

Butterflies experience taste through their feet. They are like tiny flying Andelites, complete with morphing capabilities.

Human Echolocation: You’re only as blind as you want to be

This article goes out to the amazing Amy Kux on her birthday. Happy birthday Amy!

If you take a stroll around the animal kingdom and look at all the amazing abilities that different creatures possess, it is easy to become jealous. Sure, us humans are the brainiest of the bunch and we have used our smarts to make up for some of the physical deficits nature has left us with, but riding in a car going 70 miles (112 km) per hour just doesn’t have the same coolness factor as being able to reach that speed on foot, like a cheetah can. Even the best human sprinters would be hard pressed to catch a squirrel. We can’t fly like birds or swim like dolphins. We aren’t as strong as gorillas and we can’t track criminals with our noses like a bloodhound. However, there is one superhuman ability that science is beginning to realize that some of us have an unexpected knack for...

Most people are familiar with the concept of echolocation. It is the ability of some animals (ex. bats, some birds, whales, and dolphins) to detect objects in their environment by emitting high frequency sounds and listening to how they bounce of different surfaces to create a sort of mental image of the world. Typically these sounds are too high pitched for human ears to pick up, further adding to the mystique of this impressive skill. The thing is, it might not be so beyond our ability to grasp.

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we perceive sounds, so it is easy to think that we aren’t very good at it. Humans have evolved to rely on our eyes to a ridiculous extent. The idea of losing our vision is terrifying to some people, but that is likely because most of us have never tested our ability to navigate using other senses. Rest assured, you are more skillful than you think. If you don’t believe me, try to think back to the last time you were in a really big space like a church or an airport terminal. Think about the things you heard and how they were different from the sounds that reach your ears while sitting on a soft couch in a carpeted room. Odds are if I blindfolded you, put you in one of those places and asked you which it was you wouldn’t have much trouble telling me.

Beyond the ability to distinguish between when we are at home watching Netflix and when we are about to board a plane to Prague, our ears are also good at determining the direction that sounds are coming from. You probably don’t realize it, but when you hear a bird chirp or a car backfire your two ears receive the sound at slightly different times. Your brain is able to use this difference to determine where in space the noise came from and we can turn our heads toward it without even thinking. Just like how your two eyes let you see in three dimensions, your ears let you hear in three dimensions.

A few of us, it turns out, can take what our ears can do to a level that is beyond belief. Some people who have been blind for a long time can click their tongues and detect the way the sound waves bounce off objects around them, very similar to how bats and whales do it. Apparently this is actually something that most people can learn to do. One study found that, over time, blindfolded participants could learn to tell the difference between large and small objects placed in front of them using only tongue clicks. With more practice, research has shown that people can learn to walk down hallways while blindfolded without touching the walls simply by listening to how sounds are echoing around them.

Human echolocation is something that people like Daniel Kish, founder of World Access for the Blind, have known about for a long time. Kish, who lost his eyes to cancer as a toddler, taught himself to echolocate as a child so he could know how high up he was in the trees he was climbing. As an adult he is often annoyed at the surprise people express when he rides by them on his bicycle, clicking all the way. Experts like Kish, research has shown, can use clicks and head movements to determine the distance, size, density, movement and even the contours of objects.

Kish’s message to other blind people is not to believe the world when it tells you that you can’t do something. You are as capable as you believe you are. That’s something we should all try to remember, especially as we navigate a world full of animals that appear to have us outmatched.

Olfactory Fun: The Seriously Underrated Science of Your Schnoz

When you sit down, as everyone does at some point in their life, to rank the importance of the holes in your head you are likely to get caught up on deciding which is more important, the mouth or the ears. Human beings are among the most communicative animals to ever evolve of this ball of rock and water, so it makes sense that we would consider the tools that let us talk to one another to be of the utmost importance. But to think of these organs as the sensory dream team is to overlook a potential MVP in the world of things that help us perceive the world. The true star of the show might already be front and centre.

Your nose is surprisingly important in your experience of the world. Humans are by no means powerful smellers in a world that includes heavyweights like blood hounds, sharks, and grizzly bears but that hunk of bone and cartilage in the middle of your face serves a very important purpose, possibly even more important than we can currently appreciate.

First off, without a serious leg-up from your nose, your mouth would be significantly impaired in one of it’s most enjoyable functions: taste. Our senses of taste and smell are so intertwined that some scientists believe it would be more accurate to just combine them and call the whole experience flavour. You see, when you take a bite of pizza, or cake, or seven-layer lasagna your mouth and nose initiate a sensory alley-oop, bouncing the chemical components of your meal back and forth and interpreting them in different ways.

In your mouth, receptors that cover your taste buds respond to chemicals called tastants to provide the experience of the five principle tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami/savoury. Contrary to popular belief, different regions of your tongue do not specialize in any of these tastes, you can experience any of the big five on any part of your tongue. Your taste buds also lead the charge in your experience of spicy foods. That is because each oral nub is generously packed with pain receptors that are triggered by capsaicin, the key chemical in foods that make you sweat.

You may also be fortunate enough to be what scientists call a “super-taster” if you were born with an unusually dense network of taste buds. It is estimated that one in four people fall into this camp (most are women), and their experience of food is the gustatory equivalent of front row seats for a cage match between the Loch Ness Monster and the Kraken.

However, beyond the five key tastes and your experience of spice, your tongue plays a surprisingly small role in the overall flavour of food. As you chew you force air to circulate into you nasal cavity, carrying with it odorants that trigger the hair-like receptor cells in your nose (cilia) to set off a neuronal fireworks show. Each type of odorant has its own pattern of activation but all the input gets shot directly into the brain’s olfactory bulb and is then distributed throughout the brain to form your overall impression of flavour. In fact, no other sense gets such direct access to the brain. The axons coming from the neurons in the olfactory bulb actual end in the cilia. Effectively, your brain’s root system is hanging from the ceiling of your nose.

As you probably already know, smell is also very closely tied to memory. If I showed you a picture of your grandmother’s kitchen, you would pretty quickly be able to put yourself into a nice memory possibly involving some delicious chocolate chip cookies. However, if instead of the picture I gave you a whiff of the cookies, you would be a sticky fingered 6-year old again before you even knew what hit you. The response is automatic and lightning fast, but it might be even more complicated a relationship than you can imagine.

Research has shown that your sense of smell might actually be able to predict if you will develop neurological disorders like Parkinson’s Disease or Alzheimer’s later in life. In one study, researchers evaluated the ability to smell in a group of people and sorted the best and the worst among them into two groups. They followed up with their participants many years later and all of the people who developed Parkinson’s Disease came from the bottom 10% of smellers. Scientists don’t completely understand the link between smell and memory quite yet, but it is theorized that brain degeneration could be caused by environmental factors, and those environmental factors might be coming in through the nose.

Clearly your nose contains mysteries far beyond what we currently know. Who know’s what scientific treasures could be hidden beneath you next dried-up booger?