“While studying the sense of touch, scientists at Duke Medicine have pinpointed specific neurons that appear to regulate perception.
The sensory neurons are characterized by thin spikes, and based on their volume, these protrusions determine the cells’ sensitivity to force.”
Click here for link out to full article on Neuroscience News.
Temporal correlation counts! Very interesting read on combining information from sights and sounds to make sense of our surroundings. Click the title below for a nice overview via Medical News Today.
Researchers Discover How The Brain Merges Sights And Sounds.
For the official abstract and links to the full article, click here for the Pub Med listing, or see the following reference:
Cesare V. Parise, Charles Spence, & Marc O. Ernst. (2011). When correlation implies causation in multisensory Integration. Current Biology. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.039
And…if you’re interested in more reading about sight and sound integration, here’s another cool one:
Watkins, S., Shams, L., Tanaka, S., Haynes, J. D., & Rees, G. (2006). Sound alters activity in human V1 in association with illusory visual perception. Neuroimage. 31(3). 1247-1256. PMID 16556505.
This is fantastic news for our lab’s line of research! One point for the Gestalts! Very well done indeed. Thank you to Kubilius et al. for an exciting piece of literature.
Just like a married couple – COMMUNICATION is key. Check out how the brain’s intra-hemispheric communication is a big part of how we perceive our environment. Here’s a quick blurb:
“ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2011) — Our brain is divided into two hemispheres, which are linked through only a few connections. However, we do not seem to have a problem to create a coherent image of our environment — our perception is not “split” in two halves. For the seamless unity of our subjective experience, information from both hemispheres needs to be efficiently integrated. The corpus callosum, the largest fibre bundle connecting the left and right side of our brain, plays a major role in this process. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt investigated whether differences between individuals in the anatomy of the corpus callosum would predict how observers perceive a visual stimulus for which the left and right hemisphere need to cooperate. As their results indicate, the characteristics of specific callosal fibre tracts are related to the subjective experience of individuals.”
“ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2011) — Each taste, from sweet to salty, is sensed by a unique set of neurons in the brains of mice, new research reveals. The findings demonstrate that neurons that respond to specific tastes are arranged discretely in what the scientists call a “gustotopic map.” This is the first map that shows how taste is represented in the mammalian brain.”