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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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| Visi-Sonor | ||
| An entertainment device which appeared to create both sound and light by acting directly on brain cells. It also stimulated emotions directly. |
Okay, so it would never get FCC approval. But the basic idea is that of stimulating the brain directly, rather than being forced to go through the (primitive!) step of needing to create sounds that would be heard by the ears and then interpreted by the brain.
| His long fingers caressed softly and slowly, pressing lightly on contacts with a rippling motion, resting themselves momentarily on one key then another - and in the air before them there was a soft glowing rosiness, just inside the range of vision. |
| Technovelgy from Foundation and Empire,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Lots of unanswered questions; does this work regardless of how the brain was socialized?
Compare to the peeper from Shadow World (1957) by Clifford Simak, the empathy box from The Little Black Box (1964) by Philip K. Dick and the krang from The Tar-Aiym Krang (2007) by Alan Dean Foster.
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'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
'The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case.'
'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
