It should come as no surprise to those interested in sensory processes that its research history is among the longest and richest of the many systematic efforts to understand how our bodies function. The continuing obsession with sensory systems is as much a re?ection of the fundamental need to understand how we experience the physical world as it is to understand how we become who we are based on those very experiences. The senses function as both portal and teacher, and their individual and collective properties have fascinated scientists and philosophers for millennia. In this context, the attention directed toward specifying their properties on a sense-by-sense basis that dominated sensory research in the 20th century seems a prelude to our current preoccupation with how they function in concert. Nevertheless, it was the concentrated effort on the operational principles of in- vidual senses that provided the depth of understanding necessary to inform current efforts to reveal how they act cooperatively. We know that the information provided by any individual sensory modality is not always veridical, but is subject to a myriad of modality-speci?c distortions. Thus, the brain’s ability to compare across the senses and to integrate the information they provide is not only a way to examine the accuracy of any individual sensory channel but also a way to enhance the collective information they make available to the brain.

It has become accepted in the neuroscience community that perception and performance are quintessentially multisensory by nature. Using the full palette of modern brain imaging and neuroscience methods, The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes details current understanding in the neural bases for these phenomena as studied across species, stages of development, and clinical statuses. Organized thematically into nine sub-sections, the book is a collection of contributions by leading scientists in the field. Chapters build generally from basic to applied, allowing readers to ascertain how fundamental science informs the clinical and applied sciences. Topics discussed include: Anatomy, essential for understanding the neural substrates of multisensory processing Neurophysiological bases and how multisensory stimuli can dramatically change the encoding processes for sensory information Combinatorial principles and modeling, focusing on efforts to gain a better mechanistic handle on multisensory operations and their network dynamics Development and plasticity Clinical manifestations and how perception and action are affected by altered sensory experience Attention and spatial representations The last sections of the book focus on naturalistic multisensory processes in three separate contexts: motion signals, multisensory contributions to the perception and generation of communication signals, and how the perception of flavor is generated. The text provides a solid introduction for newcomers and a strong overview of the current state of the field for experts.

An empirically informed philosophical account of human touch as a single, unified sensory modality that plays a central role in perception. It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate and powerful sense—“the first sense” because of the central role it plays in experience. In this book, Matthew Fulkerson proposes that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. Fulkerson offers a philosophical account of touch, reflecting the interests, methods, and approach that define contemporary philosophy; but his argument is informed throughout by the insights and constraints of empirical work on touch. Human touch is a multidimensional object of investigation, Fulkerson writes, best served by using a variety of methods and approaches. To defend his view of the unity of touch, Fulkerson describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. He goes on to fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. Fulkerson's argument for the unique role played by exploratory action departs notably from traditional vision-centric philosophical approaches to perception, challenging the received view that action plays the same role in all sensory modalities. The robust philosophical account of touch he offers in The First Sense has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience.

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. The volume begins to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and perception.

This textbook goes beyond introductory sensory perception by incorporating supplementary electronic materials to demonstrate the parallels between both hearing and seeing. Each chapter intermixes seeing and hearing processes so that students can easily understand that perceptual organization is the same across different kinds of sensations and modalities. Figures illustrating visual organization are paired with sound files demonstrating the analogous auditory organization. While most books on sensation and/or perception treat the senses individually there is growing awareness of just how important multisensory integration is to understanding the connection between sensory perception and cognition.

Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon which has captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike. This inherited condition gives rise to a kind of 'merging of the senses', and so for those who experience it, everyday activities like reading or listening to music trigger extraordinary impressions of colours, tastes, smells, shapes and other sensations. Synesthesia research also informs us about normal sensation because all people experience cross-sensory mappings to an implicit degree. Synesthesia has a considerably broad appeal, and in recent decades the field has experienced a resurgence of interest. These advances have painted a detailed story about the development, genetics, psychology, history, aesthetics and neuroscience of synesthesia, and provide a contemporary source of study for a new generation of scholars. The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia brings together this broad body of knowledge into one definitive state-of-the-art handbook. It includes a large number of concisely written chapters, under broader headings, which tackle questions about the origins of synesthesia, its neurological basis, its links with language and numbers, attention and perception, and with 'normal' sensory and linguistic processing. It asks questions about synesthesia's role in language evolution, and presents both contemporary and historical overviews of the field. It shows synaesthesia's costs and benefits (e.g., in creativity, memory, imagery) and describes how synaesthesia can provide inspiration for artists and designers. The book ends with a series of perspectives on synesthesia, including a first-hand account, and philosophical viewpoints which show how synaesthesia poses unique questions about sensation, consciousness and the nature of reality.