Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

Selected Topics: Multimodal Processing and The Nature of the Senses

[Note: this course is to be taught concurrently with PHIL 455W]

Important note regarding enrollment: instructor consent is required for all students apart from Philosophy graduate students.


One of the most interesting and radical areas of sensory neuroscience of late is the study of multimodal sensory processes, largely because it results seem to contradict our intuitive/philosophical ideas about what the senses are and do.  For example, most people (including philosophers!) realize that much of what goes on in the world can or could be perceived in a number of different ways, by different sense modalities.  We can perceive an orange as roughly spherical both through touch (haptics) and sight.  Intuitively, we also think that each of these forms of sensory perception—haptics and vision—has its own phenomenology.  Thus when a person looses one sensory modality, we are left with the spared modality and its own particular phenomenology.  From this it follows, pace Locke, that when a property is perceivable through only one modality, a person born without that sensory modality will never experience certain phenomenology.  A person who is congenitally blind will never be able to experience a property available only through vision, e.g. colour.  These are intuitive views — but views that the new neuroscience of multimodality makes us question.

In this class, we look at classic questions about the senses through the lens of recent research in multimodal perception.  We will begin with some historical texts on the nature of the senses and sensory individuation.  We will then read some empirical work to gain purchase on these questions: the principles of multimodal perception; the experience of the congenitally deaf and blind as the use of sensory substitution and augmentation devices; the experience of the blind/deaf; the evolutionary origins of multimodal perception; senses that appear to be inherently multimodal such as whisker perception in mice and rats and human taste, speech, and haptic perception; and at synaesthesia, which is clearly multimodal and retains the phenomenology of more than one sense.  We’ll then return to contemporary philosophical readings on the subject.

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