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How Your Senses Lie To You

You may have heard that perception is reality, but, from a neuroscientific perspective, perception distorts reality. This course will provide an overview of the neurobiology behind the human sensory systems and highlight ways that they can create illusions and misrepresent the world. Color, for example, is not an objective property of the universe, but rather an artifact of the behavior of various cells in eyeballs of creatures that possess nervous systems. There are sounds that we can’t hear and some that we can hear better than others. This course will also compare the sensory capacities of different organisms: the olfactory abilities of dogs, the ability of honeybees to see ultraviolet, and the echolocation of bats and dolphins.

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