7
votes
Accepted
How can someone asleep recognize a very brief sound?
Short answer
The auditory system remains active during sleep.
Background
Filtering of sensory input during sleep is a recognized phenomenon and indeed the senses are typically lulled during sleep. ...
- 19.6k
6
votes
Accepted
Does synesthesia lack symmetry?
Generally spoken, synesthesia is unidirectional. For example, grapheme–color synesthesia (i.e., letter–color and digit–color synesthesia) is the most prevalent type of synesthesia. The presentation of ...
- 19.6k
5
votes
Is there a term in psychology for when a tool is perceived as an extension of your body?
Short answer
Possible interesting terms are:
distal attribution (externalization)
body transfer illusion (rubber hand illusion)
embodiment
Background
This is a very interesting, yet difficult ...
- 19.6k
5
votes
Accepted
Is there a difference between physiological stimulations and psychological stimulations?
Psychology and physiology are at different levels of explanation or levels of analysis. The answer depends entirely on how you view the relationship between such levels and in particular (mental) ...
- 415
5
votes
Accepted
Difference between thoughts and sensations
Short answer
Sensations are different from thoughts and are separated in the spatial and temporal domain. The distinction between thoughts and perceptions, however, is less well defined, but can still ...
- 19.6k
5
votes
In psychophysics, why are log luminance rather than absolute luminance values reported?
In general, subjective sensation increases linearly with the the log of physical intensity, which is described by Fechner's law.
We are sensitive to small variations when light is dim, but we need ...
- 19.6k
4
votes
If light travels at c, and the human nervous system's speed/perception speed<c, why aren't we not seeing or blind at some times?
I think you are confusing speed with rate. The speed of light is how long it take to for light to get from one point to another, not how often light "events" arrive at the eye.
To give an analogy, ...
- 407
4
votes
Difference between active and passive touch?
The difference is in whether the animal has voluntary control over the touch. If the animal touches another object by moving its body to initiate the touch, then the it is active touch. If the animal ...
- 5,824
4
votes
Accepted
Is inhibitory brain circuitry involved in cross-modal sensory perception?
As far as I know, there is just one article that explicitly mentions the generation of cross-modal qualia, i.e., visual qualia in response to tactile stimulation (Ortiz et al., 2011). Before ...
- 19.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Is there knowledge of the receptive field patterns of cortical columns in associative brain regions?
Short answer
Associative brain areas are not retinotopically organized. Only lower visual areas more upstream from these areas are organized in such a predictable, low-level way. Higher up, things get ...
- 19.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Can binaural beats be generated with carrier tones outside the audible frequency range?
Short answer
No, infrasonic or ultrasonic sound cannot generate binaural beats.
Background
Binaural beats are generated in the brain and are associated with the frequency bands of the EEG. Binaural ...
- 19.6k
3
votes
Accepted
for a persistent perceptual experience, why is video able to have a lower frame rate than audio?
Sound is pressure waves; young humans can hear (aka, detect pressure waves) up to about 20 kHz. To produce these high frequency waves with a speaker with a time-domain signal, it is necessary to have ...
- 5,817
3
votes
Accepted
How quick a flash of light is invisible
It depends on ambient light, but in darkness, humans can detect as few as several photons, perhaps even down to a single photon (though all detection at these low levels is probabilistic - see Tinsley ...
- 5,817
3
votes
What causes the sensation of taste when Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) is absorbed through the skin?
Short answer
It may not be so much the direct action of DMSO on the olfactory sensory system, but the smell of one of its metabolites that is excreted via the pulmonary system and the skin after ...
- 19.6k
2
votes
Does the retina contribute in distinguishing lines and borders?
Short answer
Yes, retinal circuitry enhances the perception of contrast.
Background
In the retina, the neurons that guide the visual signal to the brain, the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), process ...
- 19.6k
2
votes
for a persistent perceptual experience, why is video able to have a lower frame rate than audio?
I don't have a full answer, but it might get things started...
You are mixing up two concepts frame rate and sampling rate. In a video presented at 24 fps each frame, potentially, has a wide range of ...
- 2,617
2
votes
How are tactile pleasure and pain differentiated in the somatosensory cortex?
Obviously, pain and touch receptors are represented by entirely different receptors in the skin, i.e. nociceptors and mechanoreceptors, respectively. Each has physically different afferents that carry ...
- 19.6k
2
votes
Synchronization of perception of sensory information
The synchronization of sensory information is called multisensory integration:
Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the
study of how information from the different ...
- 18k
2
votes
Synchronization of perception of sensory information
Short answer
The brain actively integrates and synchronizes sensory inputs, up to the point that it actually delays one modality to match it with another.
Background
Your question is all about ...
- 19.6k
2
votes
Accepted
Is thermoception part of the sense of touch in the 5 human senses or is it a 6th separate sense?
Short answer
Heat receptors are often grouped under the 'skin receptors', and hence are bundled along with touch (pressure, vibration, stretch), cold and pain receptors.
However, ciliopathy is a ...
- 19.6k
2
votes
Multistable perception with three possibilities
Here’s an image I found that triggers tristable perception (as opposed to just bistable perception):
The three possible interpretations are
A big cube with a smaller cube in front of it
A big cube ...
1
vote
Accepted
Has there been any neuroscientific study of polydactyly?
The extra finger seen in polydactyly is often connected only with a bit of skin, but it may contain bone and even joints (Fig. 1). According to the Boston's children's hospital, the extra finger (or ...
- 19.6k
1
vote
The differences between sensory distortions and hallucinations
The differences between illusion and hallucinations are quite clear and have been known for over 100 years.
For example, hallucinations are when you see things in total darkness or hear things when ...
- 169
1
vote
Accepted
What scientific evidence is there for the definable real world quality of redness independent our perception?
Short answer
None.
Background
First off, I am not familiar with the principles as laid out in your question posed by Goethe and Feigenbaum (I'll look into these people, thanks for the pointer!).
...
- 19.6k
1
vote
What is the conceptual difference between causal inference and 'prediction'
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but after some more reading and thinking this is what I took away: both the term 'prediction' and 'cause' here refer to the maximum likelihood of a distribution ($Y$), ...
- 161
1
vote
What are the definitions of 'multi-channel coding' and 'opponent channel coding'?
Short answer
Multi-channel coding in color vision refers to the different photoreceptors in the retina.
Opponent-channel coding refers to the opposing color pairs: the red-green and yellow-blue ...
- 19.6k
1
vote
Can binaural beats be generated with carrier tones outside the audible frequency range?
No, the carrier frequency for a binaural beat needs to be less than approximately 1500 Hz. The binaural beat arises because when two tones with slightly different frequencies are added, the ...
- 2,617
1
vote
How are positions and counts of higher concepts encoded in sparse representations?
You are basically asking how to bind different concepts together based off their representation in neurons. The one way I know how to do this is using the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA).
To ...
- 8,783
1
vote
Accepted
How are positions and counts of higher concepts encoded in sparse representations?
Two ideas on this so far:
I think we have neurons representing multiple occurrences of a given feature, for example one neuron for "one face", one for "two faces", etc. At some number it doesn't ...
- 751
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