You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals. When Oaklander theorized that M.’s itch was endogenous, rather than generated by peripheral nerve signals, she was onto something important, writes Atul Gawande. newyorker/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 05:01:12 +0000
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