SSW@beBee

Sensational Start to the Week at beBee: SSW@beBee

I have a hive called, “What words mean to me.”

I have now added the following feature to this hive; every Monday, I am posting contributions related to the word “senses”. This week I offer the following articles focusing on how the brain makes sense of it all. This will be presented in two parts: Part One - Sensing with Our Brain and next week, Part Two - Synesthesia. 

Part One - Sensing with Our Brain

The more we learn about the sensory system, the more complexities we discover. It is crucial, at this point, to begin to understand that we don't see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and so on. What is actually taking place is that the brain is translating the information it receives from each organ in order for us to see, hear and so on. Because it is the sensory input going to the brain that is being processed, we now understand that the brain can pick up information from one sensory organ and have that influence other sensory organs. I offer the following two examples.

Surprise!Your Skin Can Hear
"We not only hear with our ears, but also through our skin, according to a new study.
The finding, based on experiments in which participants listened to certain syllables while puffs of air hit their skin, suggests our brains take in and integrate information from various senses to build a picture of our surroundings.
Along with other recent work, the research flips the traditional view of how we perceive the world on its head.
'[That's] very different from the more traditional ideas, based on the fact that we have eyes so we think of ourselves as seeing visible information, and we have ears so we think of ourselves as hearing auditory information. That's a little bit misleading,' study researcher Bryan Gick of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told LiveScience.
'A more likely explanation is that we have brains that perceive rather than we have eyes that see and ears that hear.'
With such abilities, Gick views humans as 'whole-body perceiving machines."

Tasting the Light: Device Lets the Blind "See" with Their Tongues
A pair of sunglasses wired to an electric "lollipop" helps the visually impaired regain optical sensations via a different pathway. - Mandy Kendrick 
"Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain."

My Call To Action is my invitation. I invite you to send me a description of what makes sense to you.