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December 2000
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At CalTech, American scientists have showed that the senses are correlated
beyond what we knew. They showed people (rapidly) two circles and asked
them "how many circles did you see?" Most people said one, some people said two.
Then they showed the same people the same two circles, but this time each
circle was accompanied by a beep. Guess what. Nobody missed: everybody
counted two circles. Now they showed them the same one circle, but
there were still two beeps. Interesting: many people could sweat they saw
two circles.
So what we see is what we hear :-) Seriously, the integration of sensory
data goes probably further than we thought. It is difficult to separate
the components of a visual experience (you can't just see the yellow of
a shirt, or its size, you see a yellow shirt of that size). Well, it seems
that by the same token we can't really separate the components of the
whole experience (eg, the vision from the sound).
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In the UK, British scientists are studying an evolutionarily-ancient amphibian
that has a skeleton but a very primitive head. The question is "when and why
did heads develop". It is not a purely academic question, since the head
contains most of the nervous system, the thing we call "brain".
How and why did so much control get centralized in one place? And why the head
and not, for example, the foot? One theory is that the eye had a lot to do
with it: the more complex the eye, the bigger the head. Another theory is
that vertebrates "got" the head from shell-equipped parasites that eventually
became part of the body via endosymbiosis and eventually took over the
functions of control.
It is a little weird that we would use the same organ for eating and breathing.
What's the point of placing mouth and nostrils in the head rather than in the
chest? It only increases the chances that something goes wrong.
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