Why do we have two eyes but only perceive a single picture? Which phenomena attract our attention and which do not? How ‘comprehensive’ is our sense of touch? Why do we recognise faces?
These are just four of the many hundreds of questions which the book “Sensation & Perception” examines – and the answers to these questions offer the layman new insights, some of them quite surprising. The team of seven authors, all of them psychologists or neuroscientists, set out to explain systematically and intelligibly how our five senses work – and how these senses come together in our brain to form the ‘picture’ we make of the world. The fact that people receive the majority of their sensory stimuli through their eyes is mirrored in the book’s contents: there are seven chapters dealing with the sense of sight, three on hearing and one chapter each on the senses of touch, taste and smell. “Sensation & Perception” was originally conceived as a textbook for students studying human perception. But this should not discourage anyone, because the book has embraced all current didactic trends: numerous illustrations and some quite astonishing experiments make the subject matter comprehensible. Because the sheer breadth of the subjects which the authors wish to communicate would have far exceeded the scope of the book, the authors additionally set up a website (www.sinauer.com/wolfe), which contains further supplementary essays and interactive tests. “Sensation & Perception” combines findings from physics, neurophysiology and psychology – and occasionally even ventures into the realms of philosophy.
The introduction of the book, for example, discusses such key questions as: What is perception and which image of the world would be possible even without perception? How can we be sure that that which our senses communicate to us really exists? The authors state that their aims were to write concisely and precisely without compromising their scientific standards and to arouse the readers’ interest without ‘swamping’ them with an all-encompassing flood of knowledge. It cannot be doubted that their balancing act was successful. “Sensation & Perception” is a gripping introduction to the world of sensory perception which is also of interest to non-specialists – if the reader is prepared to read selectively and occasionally skip over certain sections which go into too much (anatomical or physiological) detail.