A device gives a person a sense no human is born with

The other upgrades on this branch give back something lost. This one adds something no one has had: a feeling for which way north is, for a magnetic field, for infrared light. The first study to do it properly put a belt on volunteers that buzzed on whichever side faced north, for weeks at a time, and found that some of them came to feel direction rather than think about it. Others have had small magnets put under the skin of a fingertip to feel electrical fields. It is a first human, done outside medicine and mostly outside the clinic.

What would count

A person fitted with a worn or implanted device detects a kind of stimulus that no unaided human sense can detect (a magnetic field, infrared light, ultrasound, or direction without landmarks), at a rate reliably better than chance, in a peer-reviewed report.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports of the people fitted with the device

Where it stands

First human. Reached on 29 November 2005, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 5 to 20 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. The searches returned a 2015 thesis on implanted magnets, a Japanese rat study with a compass chip, and background on sensory augmentation; no peer-reviewed human report and nothing bearing on the next rung.

Notes

The record is the 2005 report of the north-sensing belt worn by volunteers for six weeks. A 2010 engineering paper from the University of Reading reported volunteers sensing fields through magnets implanted under the skin. Both are first humans with no clinical product behind them; the next rung would need a regulator or a counted population, and neither is in sight.