Brain Sense: The Science of the Senses and How We Process the World Around Us

289 Pages·2009·3.9 MB·English

by  Faith Hickman Brynie

Brain Sense
The Science of the Senses
and How We Process
the World Around Us
Faith Hickman Brynie
American Management Association
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brynie, Faith Hickman
Brain sense : the science of the senses and how we process the world around us /
Faith Hickman Brynie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-1324-1
ISBN-10: 0-8144-1324-2
1. Senses and sensation. I. Title.
BF233.B97 2010
152.1—dc22 2009017998
© 2009 Faith Hickman Brynie.
Illustrations by Susan Gilbert, CMI.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in
part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Associa-
tion, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Ihave been told that my need to understand things is a disease. This book is
dedicated to all those who are similarly afflicted.
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Our brains are good for getting us around and mating suc-
cessfully, and even for doing some serious physics, but they
go blank when they try to understand how they produce
the awareness that is our prized essence. The consolation
is that we shall always be of intense interest to ourselves,
long after quantum theory has become old hat.
—Colin McGinn
“An Unbridgeable Gulf”
2007
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CONTENTS
Preface: Falling in Love with Science ix
Acknowledgments xiii
PART ONE TOUCH
1 Life Without Touch 3
2 In from the Cold 9
3 On Which Side Is Your Bread Buttered? 15
4 Pain and the Placebo Effect 21
5 Nematodes, Haptics, and Brain–Machine Interfaces 29
PART TWO SMELL
6 It’s Valentine’s Day ... Sniff! 39
7 Do Odors Dance in Your Nose? 45
8 Life Without Scent 53
9 The Sweaty Scent of Sex 59
10 Express Train to Happiness 65
vii
viii Contents
PART THREE TASTE
11 The Bitter Truth 75
12 Coconut Crazy 83
13 Cooking Up Some Brain Chemistry 89
14 How to Knit a Baby Taste Bud 95
15 Expecting What You Taste and Tasting What You Expect 101
PART FOUR VISION
16 The Big Picture 109
17 Color and Memory 117
18 Sizing Things Up 123
19 On the Move 130
20 Vision and the Video Game 137
PART FIVE HEARING
21 Hearing, Left and Right 147
22 Listening and Language 154
23 My Ears Are Ringing 160
24 Music and the Plastic Brain 166
25 Cochlear Implant: One Man’s Journey 174
PART SIX BEYOND THE BIG FIVE
26 Synesthesia: When Senses Overlap 183
27 If This Looks Like Déjà Vu, You Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet 190
28 Feeling a Phantom 197
29 Probabilities and the Paranormal 206
30 Time 212
Appendix The Brain and the Nervous System—A Primer 219
Notes 235
Recommended Resources 263
Index 267
Preface:
Falling in Love with Science
Idon’t recall when I first fell in love with science, but I remember the day
when I said, “’Til death do us part.” I was counting raspberry bushes. They
grew wild around the abandoned strip mines of Appalachia. As an ecology
student at West Virginia University in Morgantown, I clambering around an old
mine’s precarious slopes with twenty other eager undergraduates. We shot line
transects and counted the bushes, orienting our test sites by the compass, while
measuring roped-off segments ten-meters square for careful counting and map-
ping. The day was hot and sticky. The prickly bushes tore our clothes and gouged
our flesh. Black coal dust clogged our lungs. Sunburned and sweaty, we learned
that wrestling truth from reality was difficult ... and fun!
Field science infatuated me that day, but my pledge of lifelong devotion to
the scientific process came a few days later, when we pooled data from several
teams. We made graphs of numbers of raspberry bushes, north and east, upslope
and down. The graphs sang to me. Their meaning popped off the page and danced
around my desk. In axes, points, clusters, and lines, the numbers of raspberry
bushes revealed the history of the mine. In the days long before ecology became
a household word, those bars, dots, lines, and curves mirrored the fifty-year his-
tory of the mine, disclosing how the site had been worked, when it had been
abandoned, where the acid mine drainage had polluted most, and how nature
had attempted—with wild raspberries—to bandage the land so it could heal from
within. The data painted a picture more beautiful to me than any art museum
masterpiece.
From that day on, I never questioned my choice of a career. It was science
for me, in some form, and I’ve tried quite a few. In the bacteriology labs at West
ix