Have you ever looked at an optical illusion and wondered how they worked? Over the past few decades, we've acquired much knowledge of the visual system, and attempt to dive into the complexities of the brain and visual system to explain some of the phenomenon we see in our every day lives! We will attempt to dive into the neural basis of optical illusions, and talk about the cool and unknown aspects of our visual system.

“What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know” –Morpheus, The Matrix (1999) How do we make sense of the world? When you look at a rose, how can you tell it’s a rose? Was it the color of the rose that helped you identify it? Or perhaps it was scent or texture of the petals that gave it away. The knowledge that we have of the world is limited by what we can learn through our senses, and what our brains process of the things that we can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. In this course, we will take a closer look at individual senses and learn about how these senses help us interpret the world around us. Students taking this course will learn a bit about the history of perceptions and psychophysics, the study of sensation of perception. We will also explore brain anatomy, how our senses work, and the neural basis of interpreting information from the experiences around us. We will cover all the senses in the system and introduce some of the biggest unanswered questions in the field of neuroscience today.