Our Senses: Gateways to Consciousness

by Rob DeSalle

Overview

“An animated introduction to the neuroscience of sensory perception” informed by the latest research on topics from music to brain injuries to synesthesia (Kirkus Reviews).

In recent years neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world. This splendidly accessible book explores the most intriguing findings of this research. With infectious enthusiasm, Rob DeSalle illuminates not only how we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, maintain balance, feel pain, and rely on other less familiar senses, but also how these senses shape our perception of the world aesthetically, artistically, and musically.

DeSalle first examines the question of how perception and consciousness are formed in the brain, setting human senses in an evolutionary context. He then investigates such varied themes as supersenses and diminished senses, synesthesia and other cross-sensory phenomena, hemispheric specialization, diseases, anomalies induced by brain injuries, and hallucinations. Focusing on what is revealed about our senses through the extraordinary, he provides unparalleled insights into the unique wonders of the human brain.

“In the laboratory sensory science is serious business. But in the capable hands of Rob DeSalle it becomes fun and compelling for the general reader, and is made all the more accessible by Patricia Wynne’s delightful illustrations.” —Ian Tattersall, author of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300231649
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Rob DeSalle is curator at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has curated or cocurated six highly praised exhibitions and leads a research group in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics. He is the author or coauthor of fifteen books, including Welcome to the Genome. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xiii

1 The Brainless Majority: Sensing the Environment in Organisms without Brains 1

2 Brains and Prains: Brains (or Not) in Animals from Sponges to Us 15

3 The Monkey's Unculus: Tactile and Balance Sensory Capacity in Animals 27

4 A Matter of Taste (and Odorant) Receptors: Smell and Taste Reception in Animals 41

5 All Ears (and Eyes): Animal Hearing and Sight 57

6 Supersmellers and Supertasters: The Limits of Smell and Taste in Humans 66

7 Where Am I? The Limits of Hearing and Balance in Humans 85

8 Touchy Feely: Touch and How It Is Linked to Other Senses 99

9 The Eyes Have It: The Limits of Sight in Humans 108

10 Accidents Will Happen: Traumatic Brain Injury and the Impact on Our Senses 122

11 Modern Life, Strokes, and the Senses: The Impact of Strokes and Other Brain Damage on Sensory Capacity 139

12 Full/Half/Split Brains: People with Unique Brains 149

13 Team of Rivals Meets the Kluge: Making Sense Out of Crossmodal Stimuli from the Outer World 160

14 Neural Detritus: Making Sense Out of a Noisy Environment 172

15 Pani ca' Meusa, Crème Brûlée, and Synesthesia: Crossmodal Impact on Taste and Synesthesia 185

16 Connectomes: How Crossmodal Interactions Work in the Brain 205

17 Faces and Hallucinations: Facial Recognition and Hallucinations as Subjects in Higher Perception 217

18 Bob Dylan's Nobel: Language, Literacy, and How the Senses Interact to Produce Literature 230

19 Facing the Music: The Neurobiology of Music and Art 241

20 No Limits: The Limits to What We Can Sense and the Future of Our Senses 256

Literature and Further Reading 265

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

11/13/2017
In this dense companion volume to the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition of the same name, AMNH curator DeSalle (Welcome to the Microbiome, with Susan L. Perkins) aims to make sense of the senses and how they “shape our perception of the world.” Rather than organize his material according to the major senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and balance), DeSalle’s approach integrates the fields of evolution, genetics, neuroanatomy, and human variability and plasticity. DeSalle clearly explains the scientific experiments that support his assertions, but the superfluous background he offers often disrupts the narrative and occasionally leads to a loss of focus. Though chapters covering the history of human neurology can feel rehashed, DeSalle’s enthusiasm blossoms when he discusses cross-modal sensory responses and the “kluge” of competing elements that make up the human brain. In addition to showcasing extreme demonstrations of trauma-induced brain changes and hallucinations, DeSalle also notably focuses on associations between sounds and figures made by average people, such as between hard sounds and pointy figures and soft sounds and blobby figures, and on synesthesia seen in normal infant development. Unfortunately, despite an interest in expanding the limits of human sensation, DeSalle barely addresses cutting-edge technologies that modify human perception. DeSalle’s familiarity with his material is unparalleled, but the book doesn’t quite meet expectations. Illus. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

An animated introduction to the neuroscience of sensory perception with broad appeal to artists, musicians, and other consumers and generators of brainpower.”—Kirkus Reviews

“DeSalle’s enthusiasm blossoms when he discusses cross-modal sensory responses and the ‘kluge’ of competing elements that make up the human brain.”—Publishers Weekly

In twenty chapters with beautiful illustrations and diagrams (DeSalle) maps out how our bodies see, hear, taste, smell and touch—and the genomics behind their evolution in the many common ancestors who came before us.”—Forbes.com

“An unusual, illuminating, and often entertaining look at the brain.”—Library Journal

“Wonderfully broad-ranging summary of the wide range of sensory systems that exist, and more importantly, how those systems interact in order to give rise to the multisensory experiences that fill our mental lives.”—Charles Spence, author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating

“Rob DeSalle’s infectious enthusiasm and vast store of knowledge combine to make this book special, describing on a broad canvas each sense and the many different and fascinating facets of life to which they relate.”—Gordon M. Shepherd, author of Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters

“In the laboratory sensory science is serious business. But in the capable hands of Rob DeSalle it becomes fun and compelling for the general reader, and is made all the more accessible by Patricia Wynne’s delightful illustrations.”—Ian Tattersall, author of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution

“A spirited and engaging introduction to the fascinating world of the senses, from the illuminating perspective of a distinguished evolutionary biologist.”—John Carlson, Yale University

From the Publisher

11/15/2017
For this work, which is tied to an exhibition of the same name, DeSalle (curator, American Museum of Natural History; Welcome to the Microbiome) begins by examining the evolution of the senses from the earliest single-cell organisms up to the most complex modern mammals. Next, concentrating on humans and often interjecting humorous observations, he works through balance, touch, taste, and smell before coming to sight; an unusual approach to senses in humans, in whom sight has been studied most extensively. DeSalle then addresses phenomena such as synesthesia, hemispheric specialization, brain trauma, and hallucinations, and shows how our perception of the world shapes art, music, and literature. The detail in which he discusses many points has not produced the most accessible popular science, especially in the early chapters, which reflect the author's academic specialty. Even so, the book offers an unusual, illuminating, and often entertaining look at the brain and the "easy" problems of consciousness (those most closely tied to anatomy and physiology). VERDICT This book may not appeal to casual readers of authors such as Oliver Sacks, but fans of sophisticated popular science should certainly enjoy it.—Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT

Library Journal

2017-10-17
You don't need a brain to sense what's going on around you—though it helps.Consciousness may be reserved for creatures with more brainpower than paramecia possess, but there are still at least 100 million microbial species that can process sensory information about their environments. "So why all the fuss about brains?" asks genomics researcher DeSalle (co-author: Welcome to the Microbiome, 2015, etc.), curator of the American Museum of Natural History. It's a good question, one answer to which is that information about how we sense is most often the product of neuroscientific research. Such research tells us, for instance, that in the resting state, our brains trundle along at about 70 millivolts, while when they're agitated, they go up by 40 millivolts or so, a matter of "action potential" that has bearing on how the nervous, sensory, and motor systems interact. Given that there are 6,393 synapses connecting the 279 cells of the nematode nervous system, our own electronic wiring scheme begins to look impossibly complex. There, again, neuroscience has mapped out how sensory information arrives in the human brain and how it travels along neural pathways depending on what kind it is—if visual, for instance, along "nerve cells coming from the eye [that] are bundled into rather large neural structures, the optic nerves." There are no end of possibilities for going haywire, but amazingly, we get it right most of the time. DeSalle's text is written at a high level of scientific sophistication, requiring scientific literacy to follow the argument. Even so, he is light-handed enough to use Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel's this-amp-goes-to-11 shtick to explain "crossmodality," and he peppers his text with nice bits of learned trivia, such as the different color perception systems of monkeys and human artists, the lack of balance in tree sloths, and the like.An animated introduction to the neuroscience of sensory perception with broad appeal to artists, musicians, and other consumers and generators of brainpower.

Kirkus Reviews