Nerves of Perception
Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience
edited by Anna Munster
Introduction: Neuro-perception and What's at Stake in Giving Neurology Its Nerves?
For the last few years, all things ‘neuro’ have been doing the rounds in the creative arts and humanities. We have had the declensions ‘neuropolitics’ and ‘noopolitics’; we have panicked about screen media and the internet rewiring our plastic brains; we have marvelled at artists incorporating MRIs into videos, photomedia and installations. Little wonder at such a response – after all, weren’t the 1990s officially declared, by US Presidential proclamation to be the ‘Decade of the Brain’? Neuroscience – the collective nomenclature we give the sciences of the brain – is in fact a disparate assemblage of disciplines, methods and practices for understanding, healing, transposing, interpreting, imaging and, most importantly, constituting the nervous system in organisms. To get a sense of how diverse these sciences are, we can simply draw a small list up of some of them: for example, neuroanatomy, behavioural neuroscience, computational neuroscience, neuroethnology, molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, and so on. These all designate various specialities within neuroscience but also, sometimes vastly different methods, philosophical approaches and indeed ways of realising the brain as organ, system, structure or entity. Within or across any of these specialities, competing and dissonant approaches to how the nervous system is seen to function exist. A decade, indeed more than a century, of practice and research in neuroscience has only multiplied the neural as a vast field of unknown quanta and qualia. (more...)
Nervous Perception: Germinal Articles in Neuroscience on Sensorimotor Experience
- J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts
- What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain
- Evan Thompson
- Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience
- Evan Thompson
- Colour Vision, Evolution, and Perceptual Content
- Alva Noë
- Experience Without the Head
- Vittorio Gallese and Christian Keysers
- Mirror Neurons: A Sensorimotor Representation System
- Susan Martinez-Conde, Stephen L. Macknik and David H. Hubel
- The Role of Fixational Eye Movements in Visual Perception
Aspects of Sensorimotor Experience in the Perceptual Systems of Humans and Nonhumans
- Nachum Ulanovsky and Cynthia F. Moss
- What the Bat's Voice Tells the Bat's Brain
- Jaime A Pineda
- Sensorimotor Cortex As a Critical Component of an 'Extended' Mirror Neuron System: Does It Solve the Sevelopment, Correspondence, and Control Problems in Mirroring?
- Caroline Catmur
- Contingency Is Crucial for Creating Imitative Responses
- Fortunato Battaglia, Sarah H. Lisanby and David Freedberg
- Corticomotor Excitability During Observation and Imagination of a Work of Art
- Michele Rucci and Gaëlle Desbordes
- Contributions of Fixational Eye Movements to the Discrimination of Briefly Presented Stimuli
Perception and Sensorimotor Experience from Neuroscientfic, Philosophical and Creative Practices
- William Forsythe and Alva Noë
- LIVE at the New York Public Library
- Stephen Macknick
- Visual Illusions
- Garrison Institute Interview with Evan Thompson on the Contribution of Phenomenologies of Experience to the Neuroscience of Perception
Neuroculture.org: examples of work at the intersection of art and neuroscience