What You Should Know About Your Sensations

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. This concise scientific primer turns sensation into a window on the mind, tracing how psychology grew from ancient philosophy into a modern science by making sensory experience one of its most defensible subjects. It begins with the basic elements of perception—color, sound, taste, smell, and touch—and shows that these "simple" sensations are usually woven into richer moments of everyday life. From there, the book moves into physiology, explaining how the eye, ear, tongue, and skin respond to physical stimuli, why measurements of color, temperature, and odor must still be tied to subjective experience, and how the senses can misfire in paradoxical ways, from ringing ears to seeing stars. The text then explores touch, taste, and smell in depth, revealing how pressure, cold, warm, pain, heat, and wetness arise from specialized receptors, how taste is often confused with smell, and how the four basic tastes vary across the tongue. It also examines vision's astonishing range, from the eye's millions of hues to color blindness, rods and cones, and the shift between daylight and night vision. Throughout, the book argues that perception is a blended, highly organized process, culminating in striking experiments on localization and brain injury that show how carefully sensation must be studied.