 So my name is Manuel, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist working at the synthetic, perceptive, emotive and cognitive systems group in Barcelona, which is a great place to be. However, my talk will feature stuff I did earlier at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, Germany, which is also a great place to be, not as great as Barcelona though. Okay, so you're ready to go? Are you ready? Okay, let's do it. Go. All right, now that you know who I am, what am I going to talk about? Brain hacks. Well, what is a brain hack? A brain hack is just like a regular hack, just that it happens in the brain, which means you identify some neuronal mechanism that was evolutionary, probably developed to do something else. And then you understand this mechanism, and you try and hijack or manipulate or exploit it to do something different, right? Now brain hacks is not a new thing. Everybody does it, and the most prominent example are probably schools, right? The mechanism in question is learning. Now learning isn't something that you do or don't do, it's something you do automatically. Your brain just sucks information, sucks up information all the time. And school is the idea, well, let's just put the children into an environment where we control the input to this mechanism. Problem is, as brain hacks go, schools suck. They're really bad. They are ill-conceived. They are poorly implemented. They are cruelly executed. They are inefficient. It's a bit like you found this car that just keeps magically going forward, and you want to steer it into your direction of your willing, but the best thing you can cop with is jumping on it and bashing the wheels with a huge flat hammer until it turns into your direction. So the problem is, if you want to do a good brain hack, we have to understand the stuff. And if you go for brain hacks, you get a lot of bullshit about brain improvement stuff, which doesn't explain you how it works. So I want to talk about hacking new qualitative experiences. Now what are these? Philosophers call that qualia. And it's a bit difficult to explain if you're not into philosophy, but there's a very, very simple analogy. And if you look at this picture, now try to explain how this picture feels to a blind person. All right? It doesn't work. You can't. If you've never experienced something, then it's impossible just by different means to get the same sensation. Sensation is something that you have to directly experience immediately. You can imagine it, but to imagine it, you have to have this experience before, or with the words of Lewis Answering, well, okay, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know. Right, so qualitative experience is something magical, and for a long time wasn't understood how these worked. Now we're trying to get a grip on it with a theory called sensory motor contingencies. Now what are these? Well, the classical model of how humans and robots and whatsoever work is a model called perceived thing act, which is robot drives around and sees the world and sucks up all the information and builds a model of the world and thinks about, oh, what should I do next? And then acts. Now this doesn't explain a lot of things, but it makes up for very beautiful diagrams, which is I think what was popular in the 50s because people loved areas in the 50s, and it doesn't explain qualitative experiences and why you can figure out yourself, exercise to the reader. Now, think you're a submarine captain, right? And you're cruising around in the sea and a vicious sea monster just plugs up all your cables and plugs in them differently. What do you do to regain control of your submarine? Well, you just have to pull every lever and push every button and see what does it do? How does it change my sense of readings, right? And this is how you establish a sensory motor contingency. You have to interact with the world. And you have to find out if I do this, what will happen? And you have to find out what the lawful relations are, okay? So it's about the statistical regularities about how you move in the world and how the world moves back that has been identified as a key process in establishing qualitative experiences. Right, now that we know it, let's build a new one. Okay, where do we start? Well, we need a new way of interacting with the world. And what we are going to do is we are going to have a sense of north, just like pigeons do. And we build this by giving our subjects a belt equipped with an electron compass and loads of little vibrators around your waist. Now, what it does is it will buzz wherever north is, where's north, can anybody tell me? No, there, okay, so it will buzz there and as I turn around, the buzzing will turn around me as well. So subjects wear this for six weeks all day long. And this is what the newest generation looks. So those little vibrators are now actually very cheap cell phone pager motors and it's technically very sophisticated because it's all modular and does Bluetooth and whatsoever. But yeah, the basic idea is we do loads of tests before and then people wear this belt for six weeks and we do loads of tests after. And during the six weeks, they wear it all day long like they get up, put on the belt and only put it down for taking a shower or so. Now, what kind of tests do you want to do to see whether you actually have developed a new sensory motor contingency or a new modality and new qualitative experience? As cognitive scientists, we're not just interested in the brain, we want to understand everything bottom up to the very top levels of understanding. So we're not just doing brain scans, of course we're doing brain scans because this is what we get money for. But we also do sleep EEG to monitor learning with unit's technography, if you don't know what it is. Don't worry, I didn't know it before. We do lots of virtual reality experiments because we can manipulate the world, some homing like pathfinding tasks, space perception and interviews. Now, I want to talk about interviews, which you might find surprising for a neuroscientist, but the problem is to explain the neuroscience data, I need more than seven minutes, lots. Interviews are pretty simple because people tell you something, right? And now what do they tell you? After wearing this belt for six weeks, they get a strange sense of expanded space. The space around them grows. How do you imagine that? Well, the space here is currently what I perceive as one consistent space, this room, right? If I had to point out to the coffee machine in the basement, I couldn't, it's, you know, I have to think about how to go through there. It's somewhere there, but I don't know for sure. The space around these people grow to extend where they can easily point out, well, this is there and the Alexanderplatz station is there, however, the Döner Buddha is a bit more there and so on and so forth. So the space that they perceive as one grows. And this is what you can do with a relatively cheap setup and I challenge you to build your own, just go downstairs to the hardware hacking lab, grab an Arduino, hook up some pager motors. You don't need to use 30, you can use 10 or 20. Wear this belt for a week, two weeks, a day, two months, you will see something happening after five or six hours. Thank you very much. Thank you.