6: Other Senses

Cognitive Neuroscience
David Eagleman
Jonathan Downar
Chapter Outline
 Detecting Data from the World
 Hearing
 The Somatosensory System
 Chemical Senses
 The Brain is Multisensory
 Time Perception

2
Detecting Data from the World
 We use five senses to interact with the
outside world, as traditionally defined.
 There are many subdivisions of those five,
plus sensations from inside the body.
 For all senses, there are specialized
receptors to transduce the stimulus.
 All senses project to primary sensory
cortex, and have some form of mapping.
3
Hearing
 The Outer and Middle Ear
 Converting Mechanical Information into
Electrical Signals: The Inner Ear
 The Auditory Nerve and Primary Auditory
Cortex
 The Hierarchy of Sound Processing
 Sound Localization
 Balance
4
The Outer and Middle Ear
 Sounds are vibrations carried through air
or water as waves
 We interpret the frequency (measured in
Hz) of the vibration as the pitch of the
sound.
 The amplitude of the vibration is
interpreted as the loudness of the sound.

5
The Outer and Middle Ear

6
The Outer and Middle Ear
 The pinna collects and amplifies certain
frequencies of sound and directs that
sound down the ear canal.
 The sound energy strikes the tympanic
membrane and causes it to vibrate at the
same frequency as the sound wave.

7
The Outer and Middle Ear

8
The Outer and Middle Ear
 In the middle ear, vibrations of the
tympanic membrane cause movement of
the three bones of the middle ear.
 Malleus (Hammer)
 Incus (Anvil)
 Stapes (Stirrup)
 Movement of these bones causes
movement of the oval window.
9
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals
 The oval window is part of the cochlea,
which is the inner ear.
 The cochlea contains three fluid-filled
tubes, wound around a central axis, like a
snail shell.
 Inside the cochlea is the basilar
membrane, which vibrates in time with the
sound wave.
10
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals
 The basilar membrane is tighter at one
end (the base) and looser at the other end
(the apex).
 This difference means there is a tonotopic
map of frequencies along the basilar
membrane
 High frequencies near the base.
 Low frequencies near the apex.

11
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals

12
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals

13
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals
 Inner hair cells along the basilar
membrane transduce sound into electrical
signals.
 The vibration of the membrane causes the
stereocilia to flex closer together or further
apart.

14
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals
 Tip links on the stereocilia cause ion
channels to be pulled open, depolarizing
the cell, when the cilia move one direction.
 When cilia move the other direction, the
channels close and the cell is
hyperpolarized.

15
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals

16
Converting Mechanical
Information into Electrical Signals
 The outer hair cells help
to amplify and sharpen
the incoming sound.
 The basilar membrane
can break apart a
complex sound into the
component frequencies.

17
The Auditory Nerve and Primary
Auditory Cortex
 The auditory (cochlear) nerve carries
information from the inner hair cells to the
cochlear nucleus of the brainstem.
 Each fiber is a labeled line, carrying
information about only one frequency.
 Information travels from the cochlear
nucleus through a number of nuclei to the
primary auditory cortex in the temporal
lobe.
18
The Auditory Nerve and Primary
Auditory Cortex

19
The Hierarchy of Sound
Processing
 Deafness can result from damage to the
outer, middle, or inner ear.
 Damage that occurs to the auditory
pathway after the inner ear typically results
in damage to the ability to process sounds.
 Higher auditory areas are involved in the
interpretation of sounds.

20
The Hierarchy of Sound
Processing

21
Sound Localization
 We can localize sounds that occur around
us based on characteristics of the sound
and interaural differences.
 Interaural timing differences are used to
identify the location of a sharp, brief
sound.
 Interaural phase differences are used to
localize a continuous sound.
22
Sound Localization

23
Balance
 The vestibular system, with three
semicircular canals and two otolith organs,
provides information about orientation.
 The semicircular canals detect head rotation
and angular acceleration.
 The otolith organs detect linear acceleration.
 Both systems detect movement by the
displacement of hair cells, similar to the
auditory system.
24
Balance

25
Balance

26
The Somatosensory System
 Touch
 Temperature
 Pain
 Proprioception
 Interoception
 The Somatosensory Pathway

27
Touch
 The somatosensory system tells us about
the external world, where our limbs are in
space, and about our internal world.
 Receptors are found all over our skin and
within our internal organs.

28
Touch
 Touch receptors are mechanoreceptors,
which respond to stretching or bending.
 Meissner’s corpuscles and Merkel’s disks
are located close to the surface of the skin
and have small receptive fields.
 Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini’s endings
are located deeper in the skin and have
large receptive fields.
29
Touch

30
Temperature
 Thermoreceptors are mechanoreceptors
that convey temperature information.
 These receptors carry information about
how the stimulus differs from the
temperature of the skin.
 One population carries information about
stimuli warmer than the skin and a
separate population carries information
about stimuli cooler than the skin.
31
Pain
 The perception of pain by nociceptors is
necessary for our survival.
 There are three types of nociceptors.
 Mechanical nociceptors are activated by
physical damage.
 Thermal nociceptors are activated by very
high or very low temperatures.
 Chemical nociceptors are activated by
particular chemicals.
32
Pain
 Some nociceptors are responsive to more
than one type of stimuli and are called
polymodal.
 Silent nociceptors respond to the body’s
own chemical signals are can play a role
in the increased sensitivity to stimulation
following injury.

33
Pain
 Nociceptors appear to be free nerve
endings.
 Different nociceptors transmit their signals
at different rates.
C fibers are small and unmyelinated, carrying
the signal slowly.
 A delta fibers are myelinated and carry
mechanical and thermal pain signals quickly.

34
Proprioception
 Proprioception is the sense of position and
movement of our own body.
 Muscle spindles detect the length of the
muscle and the speed of stretching.
 Golgi tendon organs provide information
about muscle tension.

35
Proprioception

36
Interoception
 Interoception is our ability to perceive the
internal state of our body, such as hunger,
thirst, and mood.
 Receptors include stretch receptors and
nociceptors.

37
Interoception

38
Interoception
 Gate control theory describes why we
sometimes notice pain and sometimes do
not, depending on the situation.
 If information from the interoceptors
arrives at the central nervous system at
the same time as nociceptive information,
this can overwhelm the CNS, and the pain
signals are blocked.

39
The Somatosensory Pathway
 Information from the head and face is
carried by the trigeminal cranial nerve.
 Information from each dermatome of the
body is carried into the dorsal horn of the
spinal cord.
 Different types of somatosensory
information follow different pathways to the
brain.
40
The Somatosensory Pathway

41
The Somatosensory Pathway
 Somatosensory information decussates
and is relayed by the thalamus to the
primary somatosensory cortex (S1)
 S1 is in the parietal lobe, immediately
posterior to the central sulcus.
 There is a somatotopic map of the body,
known as the homunculus.

42
The Somatosensory Pathway

43
Chemical Senses
 Taste
 Smell
 The Sense of Flavor
 Pheromones

44
Taste
 For both taste and smell, molecules bind
to receptors and trigger the release of
neurotransmitters.
 Taste receptors are found on the tongue,
palate, pharynx, epiglottis, and
esophagus.
 Taste cells are grouped into taste buds,
which are grouped into papillae.
45
Taste

46
Taste
 There are currently five basic tastes:
Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Salty, Umami
 Salty and sour trigger ionotropic receptors.
 Sweet, bitter, and umami mostly trigger
metabotropic receptors, but activate some
ionotropic receptors as well.

47
Taste
 Most taste receptors appear to have a
preferred type of taste they respond to, but
can respond to other tastes in high
concentration.
 Gustatory afferent neurons relay taste
information to the brainstem and on to the
frontal operculum.

48
Taste

49
Smell
 The olfactory epithelium is found in the
back of the nasal cavity.
 Odorants dissolve in the mucus covering
the epithelium and bind to receptors on the
cilia of the olfactory receptor cells.
 Each olfactory receptor cell expresses
only one type of receptor.
 Receptors are all GPCRs.

50
Smell

51
Smell
 Olfactory receptor cells project to the
glomeruli in the olfactory bulb.

52
Smell
 Olfactory pathway travels from the
olfactory bulb to the primary olfactory
cortex in the rhinencephalon.

53
The Sense of Flavor
 Flavor is a combination of taste, smell,
temperature, and texture.
 Higher-level processing within the brain
evokes memories of past experiences.

54
Pheromones
 Pheromones are chemicals released to
transmit information to and influence
another member of the same species.
 Pheromones are detected by the
vomeronasal organ.
 At this time, it is not clear to what extent
humans use pheromones.

55
The Brain is Multisensory
 Synesthesia
 Combining Sensory Information
 The Binding Problem
 The Internal Model of the World

56
Synesthesia
 The brain needs to bring together
information from different senses.
 Synesthesia is a condition where different
senses are integrated inappropriately,
such as when a letter is associated with a
particular color.
 It appears to be due to heightened
connectivity between brain regions.
57
Synesthesia

58
Combining Sensory Information
 Many neurons in the brain are more
responsive when presented with more
than one sensation at a time.
 In the McGurk effect, what a subject hears
can be influenced by what they see at the
same time.

59
Combining Sensory Information

60
The Binding Problem
 We do not perceive a stimulus as having
separate visual and auditory components,
but as a unified stimulus.
 How the sensory signals are integrated is
known as the binding problem.
 Recurrent connections between the
sensory systems likely are important for
solving the binding problem.
61
The Binding Problem

62
The Internal Model of the World
 Our final perception does not rely only on
stimuli from the outside world, but also on
expectations from past experiences.
 In anosognosia, a patient is apparently
unaware of their own physical limitations.

63
Time Perception
 Time involves input from all of the sensory
systems.
 Time perception is a construct of the brain.
 Time appears to slow down in crucial
situations because the amygdala encodes
memories more thoroughly.
 These more dense memories make it
seem like the event took longer.
64