Nicola Bruno - Böcker

The world of perception is multisensory. Even a simple task such as judging the position of a light in a dark room depends not only on vision but also on sensory signals about the position of our body in space. Likewise, how we experience food depends on sensory signals originating from the mouth, but also from nose signals, and even vision and hearing. However, traditional books on perception still discuss each of the "senses" separately. This book takes a different stance: it defines perception as intrinsically multisensory from the start and examines multisensory interactions as key process behind how we perceive our own body, control its movements, perceive and recognise objects, respond to edible objects, perceive space, and perceive time. In addition, the book discusses multisensory processing in synaesthesia, multisensory attention, and the role of multisensory processing in learning. As an introduction to multisensory perception, this book is essential reading for students in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience at the advanced undergraduate to postgraduate levels. As the chapters address topics that are often left out of standard textbooks, this book will also serve as a useful reference for specialist perception scientists and clinicians. Finally, as a monograph understandable to the educated non-specialist this book will also be of interest to professionals who need to take into account multisensory processing in domains such as, for instance, physiotherapy, neurological rehabilitation, human-computer interfaces, marketing, or the design of products and services.

It is a strange and intriguing story, which begins with the German physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its story will help the reader gain fresh insight into how scientists came to be able to map and quantify complex and private emotional states.

This book explores the concept of psychophysics and details the development of the ideas which made the mathematisation of desire possible. The experience of desire accompanies us all throughout life, but dealing with it as psychologists and scientists is far from easy. Psychophysics was conceived to help map, mathematically, these unknowable feelings of desire. As such, this book will help to provide an accessible account of psychophysics while telling the story of its creation, which was, in essence, the birth of scientific psychology and contemporary cognitive neuroscience, alongside many of the technologies which characterize the contemporary world. It is a strange and intriguing story, which begins with the German physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its story will help the reader gain fresh insight into how scientists came to be able to map and quantify complex and private emotional states.