Sensation and Perception

Catalog description

Why do we see colors that aren't really there? How do we recognize a voice across a noisy room? Why does food taste different when we can't smell it? Sensation and Perception takes up these questions and many others, offering a rigorous scientific account of how the brain makes sense of the world. A central feature of this course is that students encounter perceptual phenomena firsthand before we work out the underlying neuroscience together. Through in-class demonstrations and interactive exercises, including visual and auditory illusions and hands-on experiments, students will experience the limits of their own perceptual systems in real time. Drawing on psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience, the course surveys perception across all the major sensory modalities. Students will come away with a deeper understanding of how experience arises from neural activity, and why the gap between the physical world and our perception of it is wider, and more fascinating, than it seems.