Organisms have many diverse ways of sensing, perceiving, and otherwise being aware of the world.
Slideshow:
Groups of cells (particularly in the nervous system) and groups of organisms, such as a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a colony of ants or fireflies, can work together in concerted, synchronized patterns, as if following signals perceived only by their group. Scientists may learn to observe and detect these signals. When listening to music, neurons in your ears encode the sounds into a sequence of electrical signals, called spike trains, that record the rhythm, tones, and texture of what you’re hearing. The spike trains are sent to your cortex, where the sounds are perceived, enjoyed, and interpreted. In the brain, visual scenes are broken down into elementary pieces – edges, colors, corners, motion – from which more complex perceptions are derived – textures, shapes, actions – and eventually the important features of the scene are recognized. As with dreaming, a deeper look into the visual cortex reveals an even finer disintegration of each piece of a scene, pixelated and then reconstructed inside an observer’s head. Intuition becomes stronger with use and nurture, and has a powerful way of breaking through the conventions and constrictions imposed by traditional approaches. During sleep, neural activity becomes quite different from when you’re awake. Isolated from the outside world, the brain slips into a progression of rhythmic modes, and waves of activity sweep across brain structures, changing through each sleep and dream stage. As you wake, these rhythms reorganize to encounter your waking reality. The retina is a complex network of neural cells that detect light and immediately begin signal processing to reduce noise, increase sensitivity, and identify regions of contrast and motion. While the insect eye consists of a regular hexagonal grid of nearly identical cells, each with its own lens and neurons, a mammal’s eye has a single lens and many somewhat irregularly spaced photoreceptor neurons. At the core of each being is a self-contained informational unit awash in currents and forces, processing, deciphering, responding to its environment. Sentient immersion is more critical to wildlife than to industrialized beings. Interdisciplinary science requires an ability to synthesize many strands of knowledge, to bind them together and test their strength, then extract pertinent information.
