Have you ever taken a moment to consider the incredible orchestra of sensory integration that happens constantly in your conscious life? Without this integration of our senses, the world would be a barrage of overstimulation gathered by our sensory receptors and our reality might be very disorienting. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explore and explain some of the intricacies of our incredible brain processing sensory systems that work together to create our cohesive perception of the world around us.
Just consider this hypothetical example to illustrate:
You’re in a crowded room, trying to have a conversation with one individual, while there’s music, noise and lots of other extraneous interference getting in the way. In order to determine an actionable response to the person with whom you’re engaged in conversation, your brain has to filter and isolate only the information that is pertinent to building your coherent perception of the stimuli that surround you. Your amazing brain combines the input of sight and sound, integrating these senses among many others, in order to form a clear picture of the data necessary to understand what the other person is trying to communicate to you. You might lose parts of what is audible in the midst of so much other external interference, but when you can visually see the person talking, you’re able to put together a full picture of what’s said, even if you didn’t hear it all clearly.
None of our senses are independent, basically. They’re all integrated in our brain. Through thousands of years of evolution, our brains have developed ways to compensate and fill in the sensory input gaps where needed with educated guesses, or instantaneous statistical analyses of what might be happening around us.
Your brain acts like the conductor, coordinating our sensory systems and directing the symphony of sensory perception that we call reality. We usually take it for granted as a definite, but certain drugs or certain kinds of mental disorders may interrupt sensory function, so the systems might generate visual, auditory or olfactory hallucinations when those brain regions are stimulated by some internal, instead of external catalyst. You might see, hear or smell things that aren’t really there, in other words.
It’s a little bit like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, isn’t it? If you take the blue pill or the red pill, you might get bigger or smaller, because it affects your proprioception – or the perception of your physical self in space. Like everything else, it’s all in your head. You can’t take your seemingly rigid reality for granted, now can you?
