[HN Gopher] Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpi...
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Humans have remote touch 'seventh sense' like sandpipers
Author : wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB
Score : 27 points
Date : 2025-11-08 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techxplore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techxplore.com)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| A bit linkbaity; it's not remote touch per se, but the ability to
| detect a buried object in sand by touch. The subjects couldn't
| touch the object directly but could feel where it was through the
| sand. Which doesn't seem weird or supernatural to me, the way the
| sand shifts etc will be affected by an object inside of it.
| wumms wrote:
| > Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under
| granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted
| through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.
|
| > These findings confirm that people can genuinely sense an
| object before physical contact
|
| So, it's just touch, relayed through grains of sand.
|
| Less clickbaity title: Humans have 'remote' touch like
| sandpipers, research shows
| inshard wrote:
| Same sentiment. It's still touch through a slightly less solid
| medium.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| or 'Human touch is sensitive to material dynamics', although
| that's getting into the realms of the abstract.
| davnicwil wrote:
| It seems a bit of a stretch to separate this from the ordinary
| sense of touch.
|
| I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to
| map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand
| seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling /
| reasoning.
|
| Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess
| the size and other features of things by sound without seeing
| them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo
| of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| > I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able
| to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the
| sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling /
| reasoning
|
| That seems like a very strong claim against the paper's
| results. What makes you think that the study participants
| located the cube with reasoning, rather than unthinking sense?
|
| I think we can be too quick to write things off as somehow
| coming from conscious thought when they bypass that part of our
| minds entirely. I don't form sentences with a rational use of
| grammar. I don't determine how heavy something is by reasoning
| about its weight before I pick it up. There is something much
| more interesting happening cognitively in these cases that we
| shouldn't dismiss.
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| 'normal world modelling' doesn't imply conscious thought to
| me. Humans do a ton of stuff unconsciously e.g. 'gut
| instinct'.
| davnicwil wrote:
| exactly. Gp, I meant reasoning in the automatic sense, like
| how you reason about where a ball will land from afar as
| you go to catch it.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| what is "unthinking sense?" we model the world subconsciously
| k310 wrote:
| > Tactile-based Object Retrieval from Granular Media [0]
|
| Home page with videos, and links to papers and github.
|
| > Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media (Arxiv) [1]
|
| Damn paywalls, when the material is available from the authors,
| and in much greater detail.
|
| [0] https://jxu.ai/geotact/
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04536
| cpdean wrote:
| I possess an eighth sense which allows me to determine whether or
| not I have received an email by looking at my phone and seeing
| the notification for such. I don't even need to open the email
| app and I can sense that one has arrived.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Child's play.
|
| Not only can I do the same, I can also sense the contents of my
| work email without reading it.
|
| Very specifically, I can sense it's going to be related to jam
| packing LLMs into any and every @#$&ing thing we work on
| because AI.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yeah, this seems like a phenomena that I was already aware of.
| ithkuil wrote:
| When you hold a pen in your hand and touch a piece of paper with
| the tip of the pen, you can "feel" the tip of the pen touching
| the paper even though what you actually feel is the change in
| pressure of the pen against your fingers.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Did I miss the memo? When did we get a sixth sense?
| remix2000 wrote:
| Proprioception (balance); it was always there tho afair
| tbrownaw wrote:
| What's really fun is - under "quiet" enough conditions - being
| able to kinda feel walls from up to maybe an inch or so away. Not
| sure if it's air currents or reflected body heat or sound waves
| or what, but there's _something_ there.
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