Remember your childhood suspicion that both your mother and your teacher had eyes in the back of their heads? As you got older, you realized it wasn't literally true, but it was a way of describing their awareness of what you were doing. Well now, we are coming to a place where it could be a much more literal statement. In fact, they could even have eyes in the back of their mouths.

There have been some interesting developments in the field of perception, spurred in part by research to help the blind, but also by a need to help people who have so much to see that their eyes cannot take it all in — aircraft pilots, for example. As aviation technology has evolved, cockpits have filled up with many new instruments, to the point that in some flight applications, pilots have so much to keep tr…