How We Perceive The World

An exploration of the mind and the senses.

Surprising as it may seem, the idea that the brain is the origin of mental processes is relatively new. The ancient Egyptians considered it a superfluous organ and extracted it from the noses of corpses they embalmed. In classical Greece, Aristotle found reasons for believing—wrongly—that reasoning was centered in the heart. Even the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes believed, as late as the seventeenth century, that the mind (or soul) was something that existed outside the body.

In this groundbreaking book, Ignacio Morgado plunges us into the secrets of the brain and analyzes rigorously and in detail the human mind and the world of the senses. Who are we? What am I conscious of at each moment? Can we feel ourselves outside out body, in, for example, the body of a doll? Do colors actually exist? Why don’t we have names for the thousands of scents we can perceive? Is taste the same as flavor? Can sounds evoke colors? Does what we perceive correspond with reality? Can the human mind understand itself?

The present work explains the phenomenon of consciousness and the cerebral mechanisms that make it possible. It explores the characteristics of each and every one of our senses, many of them unknown, and describes the way the brain receives and processes information.