FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

(^)
555555
Figure 11.3. The café wall illusion.
All forms of perception involve elaborate manipulation of signal
information by the nervous system, including interaction of incom-
ing neural signals with vast networks of established activity in the
cerebral cortex. This results in our perception being a transformed
and constructed representation of what is “out there,” giving rise to
perceptual experiences that are, according to the evolutionary view,
good enough to allow for our survival and reproduction in a complex
and challenging environment, but having an unclear relation to what
is actually out there.
Focusing on human sensory perception, we can think of each of
the various sensory pathways as associated with organs of reception
containing receptor cells responding to particular kinds of physical
stimuli. And then there is a particular kind of mental experience.
Thus, vision or the visual pathway has as its organs of reception the