PERCEPTIONS AT THE NANOSCALE

David Glowacki. First published in Nature, May 7 2019

Artistic imagination can help drive scientific imagination.

Building on psychology and neuroscience research linking multisensory processing and attention, our laboratory actively integrates both artistic and scientific practices to develop technologies for enabling multisensory perception of nanoscale dynamics, exploring perceptual channels beyond vision — for example, audio, touch and proprioception.

Our work has highlighted a number of applications where multisensory approaches enable more intuitive (and efficient!) nanoscale design and engineering. This is a relatively unexplored territory for nanotechnology research, requiring deep and symmetric exchanges between aesthetic practice and scientific practice, but it has the potential to usher in a new paradigm for nano-engineering, improving our dynamical intuition and our ability to communicate.