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Attention and Perception

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Submitted By shanuraj
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As you woke today, you fired up your cognitive computer, which had been turned off for the night. When you were jolted out of an unconscious state by the ringing of an alarm clock, you sensed the auditory world; when you opened your eyes, you caught sight of the visual world; when you splashed water on your face, you sensed the tactile world; when you inhaled the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee, you enjoyed the olfactory world; and when you nibbled on a fresh roll, you savored the gustatory world. Five senses—five windows to the world—only five ways to know the world.
Yet, contained within those five conduits to the “real world” are the basic means by which we comprehend everything from Picasso to punk rock, not to mention the ocean’s mist, Bach, perfume, Dostoevski, peppermint candy, sunsets, and physical intimacy. In this chapter we will find out how we humans use the computational brain to:
• Perceive information about the environment.
• Attend to the world.
• Process information during the initial stages.
We begin by examining the perception of sensory signals because this is the initial step in the processing of information. At the heart of this process is the brain, whose task it is to understand and, in effect, make sense out of the things being fed into it from the peripheral nervous system. That system is made up of nerves that lie outside the spinal cord and the brain and are involved in sensation and perception.

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