The Future of Perception

In a world where AI copyright battles and endless new tools dominate our attention, I'd like to take us in a different direction — one where technology enhances our perceptual experience, taking us beyond everything we've experienced so far into a new dimension of existence, rather than simply replacing our presence in the ecosystem.

We've all grown pessimistic about the tech industry's direction lately. The relentless pursuit of quick profits drives us toward mindless consumption and an AI-generated world. Small teams create AI tools with subscription models, extracting value without contributing to the ecosystem they're disrupting. This raises a critical question: once you've replaced the entire creative sector with AI, what's your plan for maintaining the balance of the system you've destabilized?

I experienced this firsthand, because not long ago, I was part of one of those teams. It felt like we were in a marathon or even a war. But when I finally remembered to pause and take a breath, I saw how everything that had been blurry about life and what's actually important slowly started to come into focus.

I've always been a fan of math, neuroscience, physics and music. Music is already made up of these three things. When we look deeper, we realize that these seemingly distinct disciplines actually form a whole and complement one another. Neil Turok, an extraordinary physicist known for his collaboration with Stephen Hawking once said:

This perspective, to me, marks the true direction science and technology should be headed toward. Perception is not just a passive reception of the world — it's an active construction of reality, built from layers of sensory data, memory, pattern recognition, and emotion. It defines the limits of our experience and shapes how we interpret existence itself. By enhancing or expanding perception, we are not just upgrading our tools — we are rewriting the boundaries of what it means to be human.

So, let's explore how fascinating scientific innovation can lead us to technologies that fundamentally change our lives. In this article, I introduce my personal algorithm that could make this possible.

The human perceptual system is already remarkable - we can detect a single photon with our eyes, distinguish between thousands of scents, and hear an extraordinary range of sounds. Yet there remains an even vaster world beyond our natural senses. Technologies that bridge this gap could open entirely new dimensions of experience without diminishing our essential humanity.

Ten years ago, in 2015, neuroscientist David Eagleman and engineer Scott Novich founded a company called Neosensory. The goal was to develop wearable technology to expand human sensory experience. Their most well-known product, Buzz, is a device that transmits sound information to the body via vibrations. While it was originally designed as an alternative hearing method for the deaf and hard of hearing, it also holds the potential to create entirely new ways of interacting with the nervous system. Eagleman describes this as "sensory substitution" and "sensory augmentation."

David Eagleman demonstrating the Neosensory vest at TED, a device that translates sound into vibrations on the skin, allowing deaf people to "hear" through touch.

In short, it's a human-computer interface that sends sensory data signals directly to your brain — and your brain, by learning to interpret those signals, allows you to experience a new kind of sensation. Isn't that amazing? I believe exploring the potential of our brains is the key to taking every technological advancement to the next level. At its core, Buzz works because the brain converts all of our sensory inputs into electrical signals. It doesn't care about the original source of the data — what matters is whether it can extract meaningful information from it.

Let's dig a bit deeper.

Think about how our phones transmit voices during a call. What's actually being sent isn't your literal voice — it's a compressed and filtered digital sample of your voice, taken 8,000 times per second. When we try to transmit data directly to the brain, we need a similar compression algorithm.

But the real magic happens after we succeed in delivering the signal to the brain. Since all input signals that affect our perception eventually become the same kind of electrochemical signal, we can skip the sensory organ entirely and just produce those electrochemical patterns directly.

That's exactly what Buzz does: it detects sound, separates it into frequencies, and delivers it to vibration motors. Over time, the brain learns to "make sense" of these patterns. That's why hearing, in this case, becomes an experience.

The real R&D challenge here lies in refining how that information is processed and understood.

Of course, the brain has certain criteria it uses to make sense of incoming data — like frequency, repetition, and pattern recognition. If you've ever trained an AI model, this might sound familiar. These inputs essentially act as weights, allowing the brain to extract meaning from patterns — just like in an artificial neural network. The difference is that the brain physically rewires itself — it reprograms its structure by adjusting neural connections.

Turok's quote, "Quantum technologies could completely change the way we process information," is particularly relevant here. This statement highlights the leap that quantum computing will bring. In quantum mechanics, a qubit's superposition is not simply a binary data carrier — it can hold multiple meanings, states, and directions simultaneously. This means it's not just about data, but also about context and potential. In classical computing systems, we can only simulate concurrency (the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously) — but in quantum, this is inherent. Quantum computing naturally accommodates the parallelism needed to process information in ways that classical systems cannot.

This is exactly why we can't achieve the same thing with traditional data structures (like bits, bytes, arrays, integers, and floats). Qubits are essentially a "direction" — they represent a vector, not just a value. This means that information isn't merely stored, but also processed with its potentialities and context in mind.

The exciting part is what happens after we break down brain function. How do we create a "product" that people can actually use? To create a truly effective product, my first observation and algorithmic suggestion is this: Customize it. Instead of using a fixed product, we should tailor the system to the individual's unique brain processing.

At this stage, the goal is still to send signals to the brain and help it extract meaning from them. But the real challenge lies in customizing this system to match the brain's individual mechanisms. The 86 billion neurons in our brains, with each neuron connecting to around 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, form a network of approximately 100 trillion synapses. Isn't it fascinating to think that such complexity can be simplified?

The Connectome: Your Neural Identity Map

Imagine a map so intricate it contains every connection between the 86 billion neurons in your brain—a map that defines not just what you think, but who you are.

This is your connectome.

Sebastian Seung presenting his TED talk "I Am My Connectome"

"You are more than your genes. You are your connectome."

Introduced by neuroscientists Olaf Sporns and Patric Hagmann in 2005, the connectome concept represents the ultimate map of neural connections—a blueprint of the very networks that make you who you are.