I want my Spatial Orientation Enhancement System

My ex-boyfriend used to say of my appalling bad sense of direction, "Whichever way you think it is, go the other way." Sadly, he was right. You can spin me in a circle in my own neighborhood and I'll be lost. If I don't go exactly the same route to a location, chances are, I'll get lost. I have no sense of direction.

As it turns out, I'm not the only one! Humans don't have an innate sense of direction. We visualize streets and such (and men are better at spatial navigation than women) but we aren't actually navigating by cardinal direction.

According to an article in this month's Wired, we can't develop new senses but scientists have discovered that we can train the senses we have to do new things!

"Here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared — into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them."

The Spatial Orientation Enhancement System was built and tested to see if humans could navigate blind, as pilots need to do when they lose visual control. 11% of Air Force crashes are the result of spatial disorientation.

The non-pilot author of the article tried it in a simulator and reported amazing reults:

Flight became intuitive. When the plane tilted to the right, my right wrist started to vibrate — then the elbow, and then the shoulder as the bank sharpened. It was like my arm was getting deeper and deeper into something. To level off, I just moved the joystick until the buzzing stopped. I closed my eyes so I could ignore the screen.

As soon as they can figure out how to make the feelSpace belt look less like something strapped to a suicide bomber, I'm getting one.