Intro In this essay I outline Casey O’Callaghan’s liberal view of multimodality. I suggest that our current understanding does not justify such an extensive view on the multimodality of the senses, and I critique his stance on the prevalence of crossmodal interactions between the senses as an over interpretation of the current experimental data. I argue for a more conservative account of crossmodal interactions between the senses, and hypothesize that perception is best described in terms of distributions. To support this hypothesis, I provide evidence in the form of Jonathan Cohen’s account of synesthesia.
Outlining O’Callaghan O’Callaghan, author of Perception and Multimodality, begins the his discussion by pointing out that most past
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The first, which he refers to as the “weak view” (5), is that we simply perceive with different sense modalities (e.g. touch, taste, vision, etc.). But, this view appears inadequate in the face of physiological and experiential evidence. O’Callaghan points out that neurological pathways activate in unison, and that our perception appears to us as one continuous experience, rather than subdivided into individual experiences of each different sense. (6) O’Callaghan admits that the senses often outwardly appear to be unimodal, experience does not seem broken up into different senses but appears continuous. He then goes on to support this claim with evidence from psychological …show more content…
To start, I will give O’Callaghan the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant perception only in humans when he claimed that perception could not be understood unimodally, for one could imagine a simpler organism that only has one sensory organ; would we be able to explain this creature’s perception adequately without appeal to multimodality? I would hope so, being that it has only one modality. In this case, we could fully describe the perception of this organism in unimodal terms. Now, perhaps, this thought experiment is a bit extreme, but it highlights a pertinent point that requires more discussion: there is often significant variation in biological structures and processes between different species, populations, and individuals. Some organisms have more or less sensory organs than others; some people have more or less cross modal interactions than others (this shall be discussed in more detail in the section “Perception as a Distribution”). This idea of variation brings us to the topic of synesthesia, a neurological phenomena in which stimulation of one
Imagine a world where numbers, letters, tastes, and sounds have color. Imagine a world where letters and numbers have personalities. For a synesthete, this is their world. Synesthesia occurs from a cross wiring in the brain. Instead of one sense being used in a particular action, multiple senses are used. Although little medical knowledge is known about the condition, it is fascinating and continues to impact our world.
In this paper, I will argue that it is more likely that the qualia of colour could be explained by physicalism rather than by property dualism. Qualia are subjective experiences, such as our senses (pg. 3). Physicalism views every property as physical, and can be explained by science (pg. 29). Property dualism refers to the philosophical view that minds are made out of one substance, but contain physical properties, and a non-physical mind (qualia) that are not related to each other (pg. 29).
Another speaker, Margaret Livingstone delves into the visual aspect of our senses. Livingstone mentions how artists recognize things about vision that neuroscientists are not privy to until years later. Livingstone discussed the differentiation between color and lightness, and how the two contribute differently to a work of art. Color is thought of as “comparing activity” whereas light is thought of as “summing them.” Livingstone indicates that the visual system is subdivided into a ventral system and a dorsal system.
“It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future that all time is now-time, centred in the being.” (Pp39.)
This book is about the human mind and the abstractness of our visions and memories. Everything affects us physically and mentally. We all share a common feature; we are all simply human with simple human minds.
Our five senses –sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch help the ways in which we perceive the world around us. And while they seem to work independently at time they can effect each other and the way we comprehend something. Seeing something pretty, touching something soft, eating something cold and smelling something rotten are the sense we use to connect with the world around us and will all effect how we move forward in that situation. When you look at the top picture say the color of the word not the word itself. It is harder than it seems and takes a little practice to do it efficiently. It is because we see the spelling we were taught not the color it was written in. It is hard to process it the other way, but not impossible. Take the bottom picture for another example is this a
Current research shows that mental events cause physical events, and scientists believe examining single nerves is the key to understanding how the brain works as a complete unit. Understanding the brain at the nerve cell level will allow scientists to understand how human consciousness works (Blakeslee, 1992). Furthermore, the brain's thalamus is identified as the possible sensory connector because it fires 40 impulses per second that sweep through the entire brain (Blakeslee, 1995a). These findings are a serious implication to Dualism because it states the mind is not physical. If the mind is not physical, it cannot affect the physical body, so the Dualist theory of two-sided interactions between the body and mind are false. The aforementioned argument is supported by many other scientific facts and objections against Dualism.
Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which a person experiences “crossed” response to stimuli. It occurs when stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (such as hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision) (Ward, 2015). The most usual form of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which seeing particular letters or numbers evokes the experience
The objective mind takes cognizance of the objective world. Its media of observation are the five senses. It is the out growth of man’s physical nece...
A recent neurobiological approach to understanding consciousness, at least on a perceptual level, has involved the study of the phenomenon of blindsight. Damage to areas of the visual cortex often result in complete or partial blindness. Although the eye itself is undamaged, patients report an inability to detect any light input in part of (or the entire) visual field. However, experiments regularly show that somehow, visual cues are processed. Visual inputs presented to the blind field affect the patient's response to stimulus in the normal visual field. Reaction times to stimuli are affected as well as the interpretation of the stimuli. A visual cues presented in the blind field may suggest a certain interpretation of an ambiguous stimuli. For example, the interpretation of the word "bank", presented as an auditory cue, differs depending on whether the word "river" or "money" is presented to the blind field, even though the patient does not...
Perception is defined as the process of organizing, interpreting, and selectively extracting sensory information . Visual perception is left to the individual person to make up their own mind. Perceptual organisation occurs when one groups the basic elements of the sensory world into the coherant objects that one perceives. Perception is therefore a process through which the brain makes sense of incoming stimuli.
D. W. Hamlyn - author. Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Place of Publication: Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception. Contributors: London. Publication Year: 1961. Page Number: iii.
With each of our senses (sight, smell, touch, taste, and hear), information is transmitted to the brain. Psychologists find it problematic to explain the processes in which the physical energy that is received by the sense organs can form the foundation of perceptual experience. Perception is not a direct mirroring of stimulus, but a compound messy pattern dependent on the simultaneous activity of neurons. Sensory inputs are somehow converted into perceptions of laptops, music, flowers, food, and cars; into sights, sounds, smells, taste ...
Although the realm of objectivity is far lesser than that of truth, it is still unattainable. A crucial misconception in categorizing objectivity is that every reproducible process is considered objective. Similarities in different representations of a single object do not imply similarity of its representation with its objective reality: it is totally possible that none of these representations manifest its objective reality. Therefore, reproducibility is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for objectivity. A significant tool for objectivity is the sensory action, especially the act of observation. Observation is not a one-way phenomenon: it
I really like the neurological and biological side of psychology, that’s why for this journal I am going to discuss the senses, and specifically how they work in me, vs. my brother Cody with sight and hearing. Disclaimer, my brother and I are not biologically related, but since we are both humans, we share 99.5% of the same DNA, so I say it's a fair biological comparison. As a summary Cody has a form of Autism called Asperger's, with that comes Sensory Overload, and he also has Synesthesia, I on the other hand have Sensory, Auditory, and Visual Processing Disorders; and am color, depth, and shade blind. Cody and I are polar opposites when it comes to the five senses, so it makes the comparison very cool. All of this stuff gets super complicated