In what seems to be a delayed April Fool’s Day story, Reuters describes a new patent received by Sony, which describes a mechanism “for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce “sensory experiences” such as smells, sounds and images.” The patent described seems to be 6,729,337, issued in May 4, 2004 and describing Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex:
A non-invasive system and process for projecting sensory data onto the human neural cortex is provided. The system includes a primary transducer array and a secondary transducer array. The primary transducer array acts as a coherent signal source, and the secondary transducer array acts as a controllable diffraction pattern that focuses energy onto the neural cortex in a desired pattern. In addition, the pattern of energy is constructed such that each portion projected into the neural cortex may be individually pulsed at low frequency. This low frequency pulsing is formed by controlling the phase differences between the emitted energy of the elements of primary and secondary transducer arrays.
