Neurology/perception

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edited by Anna Munster

Anna Munster

Introduction: Neuro-perception and What's at Stake in Giving Neurology Its Nerves?

For the last few years, all things ‘neuro’ have been doing the rounds in the creative arts and humanities. We have had the declensions ‘neuropolitics’ and ‘noopolitics’; we have panicked about screen media and the internet rewiring our plastic brains; we have marvelled at artists incorporating MRIs into videos, photomedia and installations. Little wonder at such a response – after all, weren’t the 1990s officially declared, by US Presidential proclamation to be the ‘Decade of the Brain’? Neuroscience – the collective nomenclature we give the sciences of the brain  – is in fact a disparate assemblage of disciplines, methods and practices for understanding, healing, transposing, interpreting, imaging and, most importantly, constituting the nervous system in organisms. To get a sense of how diverse these sciences are, we can simply draw a small list up of some of them: for example, neuroanatomy, behavioural neuroscience, computational neuroscience, neuroethnology, molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, and so on. These all designate various specialities within neuroscience but also, sometimes vastly different methods, philosophical approaches and indeed ways of realising the brain as organ, system, structure or entity. Within or across any of these specialities, competing and dissonant approaches to how the nervous system is seen to function exist. A decade, indeed more than a century, of practice and research in neuroscience has only multiplied the neural as a vast field of unknown quanta and qualia. (more...)

Nervous perception: germinal articles in neuroscience on sensorimotor experience

J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts
What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain

Evan Thompson
Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience

Evan Thompson
Colour Vision, Evolution, and Perceptual Content,

Alva Noë
Experience Without the Head

Vittorio Gallese and Christian Keysers Mirror Neurons: A Sensorimotor Representation System

Susan Martinez-Conde, Stephen L. Macknik and David H. Hubel
The Role of Fixational Eye Movements in Visual Perception

Studies and commentaries on aspects of sensorimotor experience in the perceptual systems of humans and nonhumans

Nachum Ulanovsky and Cynthia F. Moss
What the Bat's Voice Tells the Bat's Brain

Jaime A Pineda
Sensorimotor Cortex As a Critical Component of an 'Extended' Mirror Neuron System: Does It Solve the Sevelopment, Correspondence, and Control Problems in Mirroring?

C. Catmur
Contingency Is Crucial for Creating Imitative Responses

Fortunato Battaglia, Sarah H. Lisanby and David Freedberg
Corticomotor Excitability During Observation and Imagination of a Work of Art

Michele Rucci and Gaëlle Desbordes
Contributions of Fixational Eye Movements to the Discrimination of Briefly Presented Stimuli

Other online resources about perception and sensorimotor experience from neuroscientfic, philosophical and creative practices

William Forsythe & Alva Noë
LIVE at the New York Public Library

Stephen Macknick
Visual Illusions



Neuroculture.org: examples of work at the intersection of art and neuroscience

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