If you’ve always wanted some kind of Jedi-like superpower, you’ve had one all along. It’s just not as showy or even at all noticeable as, say, levitating an object with your brain or tricking the weak-minded into doing your bidding at the wave of a hand. According to researchers, all this time, humans have been able to feel objects before actually touching them.
See? Not super impressive, but still kind of cool.
A new study presented at the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning shows that when we move our hands through granular stuff like sand, our fingertips can pick up subtle shifts in the grains caused by hidden objects. Called “remote touch,” this ability was previously known in some shorebirds, like sandpipers and plovers, that use specialized beaks to sense buried prey.
We can do it too. But since we are regrettably beakless, we instead do it with our bare hands.
The lead researcher on the project, the incredibly named Elisabetta Versace of Queen Mary University of London, says this discovery expands the “receptive field” of human perception.
Humans’ Remote Touch Compared to Robots
In the experiment, 12 volunteers swept their fingers through sand to find a hidden cube without making direct contact. They nailed it about 71 percent of the time within the expected detection range. That percentage is significantly better than random chance, meaning that there might be something more going on with our senses than we previously thought.
The team also ran a robotic tactile sensor through the test to see how well it performs compared to us. The robot technically detected objects from a little bit further away, but it also ran into the same issue as modern AI chatbots: hallucinations. It was tossing out false positives left and right, ending up with just a 40 percent overall rate of precision.
There aren’t a ton of practical uses for remote touch. It’s not like you’re gonna be able to locate your keys through drywall. But study co-author Zhengqi Chen thinks that better understanding this skill could help engineers design tools and assistive tech that could extend human touch or, down the line, help robots perform delicate tasks like handling fragile items.
The post Humans Share a Superpower With Shorebirds appeared first on VICE.
