Summary – Sensory and motor system (Chapter 8,9,10)
These chapters focus on the primary functions of the human brain that are necessary for living. Interestingly, there are common for the vast majority of animal species. For example, mammals can distinguish different kinds of sensory inputs and make some conclusions, and mainly learn from them. When we focus only on humans, our sensory system is on a higher level against the animal because we can receive much more inputs because our brain capacity have enough space and power to process this input data, and humans have the great character to try different ways even the last option is very good.
When I started reading the book, I was pretty surprised by the number of tastes which we have. Especially the umami taste, which detects amino acids, which are mainly in proteins. The following interesting fact is that sour and salt taste uses serotonin as a neurotransmitter, the same neurotransmitter that regulates sleep or mood.
We do not know how the brain knows what smells feel. We just know that for coding of smells (1000 kinds), population coding, sensory maps, and temporal coding are used.
About the vision can be found lots of interesting facts. For example, more than a third of the human cerebral cortex is involved with analyzing the visual world, and the resolution is incredible, if we look at the moon on our retina, it is only 140 um, and we are still able to recognize some features of the moon.
And there are many other facts and information that are important for understanding the visualization system, and I have already read the chapters. Still, I remember just the basics, but the whole topics are very interesting, and that is why I would like to buy this book in printed version because I do not know what part of the brain I will be interested in in the future. The book covers lots of important functions in detail.
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