GlowsAreLosers/technology/capabilities.rst

Reading Capabilities
====================

- Complete decoding of conscious thinking, whether verbalized or not.

- Complete transcription of one's inner monologue.

- Identification of intent, even if it's not verbalized. For example wanting
  to get up and do something, or wanting to initiate a conversation; and even
  "passive" intents like wanting to not respond or deciding to not react to
  something.

- Decoding of visual perception, whether its source is vision, memory
  or imagination.

- Decoding of audio perception, including the sounds you hear, remember
  or imagine.

- Decoding of somatic sensory perception, including that coming from physical
  stimuli, memory, imagination.

- Decoding of all sorts of emotions and what I call "virtual sensations" that
  are activated in the cortex as a reaction to thoughts, emotions or experiences. 
  From general moods like joy, sadness or anger, to everything else you perceive
  "in your body", like goosebumps, "pins-and-needles", sexual stimulation.


Manipulation Capabilities
=========================

(Before I start I want to set something aside, which is that they do **not** have
the ability to control your thinking - at least not directly. This is discussed
more in the `limitations <./limitations.rst>`_ article.)


Visual
------

Inducing visual perception and visual phenomena, both during wakefulness and
sleep (i.e. hallucination and dreaming, respectively). They can also cause your
vision to black out, make you see "television static", induce an artificial
blurring in any segment in your vision, superimpose visual artifacts and effects
like flashing, and even beam waveforms that manipulate the interpretation of
existing objects in your vision - e.g. make something seem briefly larger or
smaller than it is, alter its perceived position, make it seem like it's moving,
or alter the perceived colors in your view (what I'm going to liken to an
Instagram filter being applied to your vision).


Audio
-----

Inducing audio perception and phenomena. This includes the well-known high-
pitched buzzing sound ("microwave hearing"), voice-to-skull (v2k), audio
hallucinations, and various "effects" like altering the perceived loudness or
location/direction of the sounds that you are hearing, and causing your hearing
to black out.


Sensory
-------

They can induce all sorts of sensory perceptions and phenomena, which includes
way more things than you'd realize is possible, because the somatic sensory
cortex in the human brain has a surprisingly vast range of functions.

This includes:

- **Primary sensory phenomena:** Anything you can ever experience from physical
  stimuli, like touch, heat, cold, pressure.

- **Interpretative sensory perceptions:** This includes various "feelings" that
  you may experience in your body, for example feeling like your arm is "tired"
  and needs to rest (which normally would happen after some workout), or feeling
  like your limb is "about to fall" (which you'd normally experience e.g. if
  you're on the edge of your bed), or feeling that **your entire body** is about
  to fall (which would normally happen if you lose your balance), or feeling
  that a part of your body is "unwell" (which would normally happen if you have
  an illness or infection of some sort in there), and much more.

- **Systemic sensory perceptions**: Like fatigue, dizziness, hunger, feeling
  "unwell" or "sick", and really any systemic feeling you can experience.


Emotions
--------

Pretty much every emotional state you can think of, and even ones you have never
seen before - joy, anger, sadness, anxiety, feeling "unwell", feelings of doubt,
feelings of unconfidence, feeling helpless - they can all be beamed into your
brain.

I'm not mistaken, emotions (or at least a significant part of them) might be
"represented" in human perception as "virtual sensations" that occur in the
somatic sensory cortex (but without any physical stimuli, as they are activated
via cognitive neural paths).