The sense of north
Can humans learn a new sense?
Some Australian tribes use cardinal directions in their speech: they talk about east and south instead of relative left or right. They constantly track the directions.
There have been projects that gave people elsewhere the sense of cardinal directions: belts and ankle bracelets that vibrated from the direction of north. That worked well. As a side effect, that made it easier to know where places are relative to each other and improved the ability to navigate. But you had to constantly wear them; the moment you took them off, you lost the sense. You didn’t really acquire it, you just had it temporarily.
I decided to fix this.
Last year, I made an app that uses headphones to make the user hear a sound that comes from the direction of north. That alone did what wearable devices can do. You specify [1..300] seconds and become continuously aware of cardinal directions.
But then I did something better, that made the sense persist even when the app is off.
Instead of hearing a sound that appears to come from the direction of north, you hear a non-directional cue sound every [2.300] seconds; and then, one second later, a directional sound that comes from north.
So rather than constantly feeding the brain with answers — which create the feeling of north, but don’t persist — the app feeds it a question and then the answer immediately afterwards.
You quickly learn to anticipate the direction the sound will come from. As the feeling of the direction in which north is gets stronger, you can decrease the frequency of the sounds. And you acquire a sense of the direction of north that persists even when the app is off! You continue to track north even as there is no more sound, because tracking north is what allowed the brain to predict where the sound will come from immediately after the cue.
I originally made it for iOS, now it’s also available for Android.
(And it’s open-source, feel free to contribute!)