 Sensation & Perception is an undergraduate/graduate course co-listed in Psychology and Neurobiology. The idea is to teach students the difference between a physical stimulus--like a sound or an image--and the percept constructed by the brain. After covering psychophysical methods for measuring perception, we study the sensory organs, emphasizing the eye, and the neural circuits that transform sensory input to produce an interpretation of the stimulus. The two are not always the same, as illustrated by the image on the left. According to the retina this is simply an assortment of pie slices, but the brain uses experience to construct a more elaborate, three-dimensional percept of a cube.
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