Daredevil Message Board

[jumonji]

Reality meets the Marvel Universe – part 2. Sort of… I was obviously having a lot of fun discussing the radar over in that other thread (although I honestly didn’t mean to turn it into a discussion about the nature of the radar sense, but was more curious about what people were thinking about the experience of it). So, since I’m completely bored with work and have all these old textbooks lying around since college I thought I’d see if I could try to explain how his other senses might work, just for fun. Let me know how you think I’m doing with this. Marrying science and superheroics is quite a challenge.

So, starting with touch, here are some general basics, as it pertains to “normal” humans (suddenly that book I had to buy for my neurobiology class is coming in mighty handy):

The most sensitive part of the body is, obviously, the fingertip which has more touch receptors than any other area of skin anywhere. I should also mention that the kinds of receptors that register pain do not fully overlap with the ones that register touch, and are also carried to the brain via different pathways, so Matt really can have a heightened sense of touch without this being painful at all. It’s been suggested in the comic that his heightened sense of touch actually causes pain, but this seems extremely inconvenient to me. I can imagine that his touch sensations right after the accident would have been uncomfortable in other ways, but it’s probably one of those things that the brain gets used to after a while. So – back on topic – how sensitive is the human fingertip then? Pretty sensitive actually. A stimulus as small as 0.006 mm (0.0002 in) high and 0.04 mm (0.0016 in) wide can be felt. Apparently, according to my trusty old textbook, a braille dot is 167 times higher than that.

So the problem us normal humans would have reading print in a newspaper by touch has little to do with the sensitivity of the touch receptors themselves, and more to do with resolution. The problem is that, as sensitive as the fingertips are, the two-point resolution limit is somewhere between 2 and 2.5 mm (0.08-0.10 in). That means that if you apply two points of pressure that are any less far apart than that the brain will register it as one single stimulus. In this sense, braille is already operating at the edge of human capacity as the space between the dots in a braille cell is about 2.5 mm. If you were to move them much closer together than that the fingertip would lose its ability to resolve the information despite the fact that it could be felt very clearly.

Okay, now what does this tell us about Matt’s ability to read print by touch? Well, first of all, this is not an issue of raw brain power since just amping up the brain’s sensitivity to touch would be insufficient (though it would probably help). He’d actually need more touch receptors in the skin to be able to pull this off. Here, I’m going to go with a guess (hey, it’s just for fun anyway) and say that doubling the density of touch receptors would probably be enough to discern the features of regular-sized newspaper print when also coupled with heightened sensitivity generally (having the touch receptors fire at a smaller stimulus than would normally be required).

So would this ability max out at some point? If we apply real word logic, it should, but this is the Marvel Universe so I guess we have to suspend our disbelief for quite a few of the things Matt does. Still, his sense of touch is not infinite and the touch receptors can’t be infinitely close together. I imagine that there should also be some physical limitations that come into play at some point where the ink gets to be faint enough to actually drown in the background noise of the structure of the paper it’s printed on. So it makes sense to me that his ability to read print with little effort would depend on a long list of things ranging from paper quality, the amount of ink, the size of the letters and even the type of font. With really small or faint letters he would probably have to struggle more with it, and probably apply some technique of analyzing the whole shape of the word rather than the individual letters. The way I see it, he should have no problems at all reading the imprints left by regular handwriting though. What do you think? Or, to mirror the radar thread, let’s ask some questions:

1. When given a choice, does Matt prefer braille over print? (Or is it even the other way around?)
2. Does reading print require any amount of real effort? How would this depend on various other factors? (though this kind of ties into question number 1).
3. How fast do you think he can read and would his speed depend on whether it’s braille or regular print?*

*As a reference, the average college student reads 250-350 words per minute and very fast readers can read twice as fast. Most braille readers are slower (usually due to not learning as young children), but speeds of over 400 wpm are not rare. This is not a limitation of braille, but of reading by touch generally as you’re only “seeing” a certain amount of information at a time and cant’ “look” ahead.
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The Other Murdock Papers

[Darediva]

Cool topic. Thought provoking.

I'm too lazy to look it up, but it seems to me somewhere in the series, Matt made reference that he'd rather read braille because it was so much faster for him. Although when he doesn't have a transcription readily available, there wouldn't be a lot of choice except to try to decipher the printed page, now would there?

No doubt in my mind that Matt would read braille faster than he would any sort of printed font. This to me is like trying to read a complex uncial font. It takes longer for a person to decipher that type of font if he is not used to looking at it. Or another example, reading kanji. A person has to train himself to recognize the various symbols in order to begin to read the language, even if it is the reader's native language. There are thousands upon thousands of fonts in use today, just in the roman alphabet. So, yes, it can take effort to read printed matter, even for the fastest reader, when confronted by an unfamiliar font.

As for reading handwriting on paper? Ever try to read your doctor's handwriting on a prescription form? I rest my case.
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Alice




Those who throw dirt merely lose ground.

[jumonji]

[Darediva]

I saw an interesting segment on the Wired Science program on PBS this week, where some research has been done using a device that a person puts on the tongue that connects to a camera on a headband. The resolution is good enough that the subject could tell what playing card was in front of him, and could navigate along a marked path.

The inventor of this device said that since all tactile sense is not just in the fingertips, this made good sense to try. He cited the experiments done with a device that formed patterns on one's back, and how much better the resolution could be with smaller devices placed on the tongue.

Weird, but cool science, I thought.
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Alice




Those who throw dirt merely lose ground.

[jumonji]

With the holidays behind us, I thought I'd tackle Matt's sense of hearing next, attempting to answer the question of just how good your hearing needs to be in order to hear heart beats. An exercise in futility perhaps, but I'm up to the challenge. However, before I get to that (over HERE), I thought I'd try to explain why he shouldn't be able to "read" computer screens by touch, since it kind of ties into what I mentioned in this thread.

Anyway, to provide a background to this little "sub-topic" for people who haven't read much from vol 1, Chichester introduced this idea in the second (I believe) issue of the Last Rites arc ("Fall of the Kingpin") when Matt hacks into the SHIELD mainframe. Part of the reason I think this is a little disappointing is that there were several other ways Chichester could have solved this problem. One being to simply have Matt push that nifty little "print screen" button we all have. Problem solved, and no reason to take his powers to new extremes and break the laws of physics in the process.

Anyway, Chichester used it on a couple of occasions after that and I think DeMatteis used it once too. After that, the idea seemed to disappear, and the only other time I can remember seeing Matt use a computer since then was in the Guardian Devil arc where the computer seemingly generated some kind of speech output (presumably from screen reader software). This makes much more sense, although not much else in that arc did. No offense to anyone who liked Smith's work. To each his own, and all that...

So, on to the reasons why, in my opinion, Matt shouldn't be able to read computer screens by touch (and this applies to any other type of light-based interface as well):

1) The detection of heat by the skin is more or less separate from the standard sense of touch. Touch-receptors in the fingers are comparatively dense. The receptors that detect heat are few and far in between. This however, is a limitation of biology and, as such, one that writers could decide to override if they really wanted to.

2) Here's where it gets really tricky because amping up Matt's senses really wouldn't be enough. While there are lots of people/entities in the Marvel Universe who can alter physical reality (just ask Peter Parker... ), Matt Murdock has never been described as being one of them. His senses are amazing, but they can't pick up on anything that just isn't there. Since he can't perceive light in any form, he's always had to resort to picking up the residual heat associated with light, rather than the light itself. The same thing would have to go for computer screens, TV screens and the like. The problem here is that heat doesn't behave like light at all. Not only would the temperature difference between different areas of a computer screen be extremely small and, in the case of TV, ever changing, the dispersal pattern would be a problem as well. Unlike light, heat doesn't travel in neat little bundles of waves. Thermal energy is a fairly "chaotic" form of energy so any heat pattern found on a computer screen would "break down" almost immediately since that is the nature of how heat works. The letters would have to be really big and held in place for quite a while for this to have any chance of working. There is no way that I am aware of for discerning standard-sized letters/images on a screen from heat output alone, and the act of doing so would have very little to do with reading print in a newspaper or discerning between different textures. They are, for all intents and purposes, competely different "animals."

While I don't doubt that Stan Lee would have come up with a way for Matt to read computer screens if computers had been prevalent in the 60's, it is not a natural extension of being able to read print on paper. So, while I can certainly understand those who might be saying that it would be "cool" if he could, in fact, read computer screens, it would almost be on the same level as having him be able to read minds. He'll just have to live with it...
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The Other Murdock Papers

[Katerine]

Very informative, jumonji - thank you! I always just assumed that the radiation gave him extra nervous connections in his brain - I didn't realize that he would need more in his fingers as well. This makes more of a solid case for him actually being "superhuman" (which, since I like stories about people being "special", is all to the good in my book ).

Regarding your question about reading: I'm firmly of the opinion that, although Matt can read print fairly quickly, he would definitely prefer braille, simply because braille, unlike print, is designed to be read by touch. It's more orderly, doesn't have slants and curves that make it harder to read...

Let's put it this way - before Louis Braille came along, the only way blind people could read was by reading regular print that's raised up on the page. It took them a really long time. As opposed to braille, which stunned sighted people when it was demonstrated how quickly it could be read.

In Matt's case, I can see how braille might cause his fingers to hurt after a time, for much the same reason that it hurts to read in bright sunlight (sensory overload). But it would still be far preferable to print, for much the same reason that a non-deaf talented lip-reader, when watching TV recreationally, would still prefer to watch with the volume on, rather than watch it with the volume on mute.

[jumonji]