From The Royal Institution.

In the first of his 1982 CHRISTMAS LECTURES series ‘Common sense’, Colin Blakemore discusses how the brain works and how this translates into physical processes.

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This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 18 December 1982.

Find out more about the CHRISTMAS LECTURES here: https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures

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Lecture 1: Making Sense

Imagine living without sense organs. However agile, however intelligent, however strongly motivated we were, we could do nothing: without our senses we should be at the mercy of the elements and of those animals that could see or hear us. To make a success of the business of managing its life any animal must have senses to tell it the time of day, where home is, how to find a mate, and what to eat. Even plants can have reactions to the direction of the sun, to the moisture of the soil, to the temperature of the air, and to the chemical composition of the soil. But plants don’t organise their behaviour; they don’t actively and intelligently explore their surroundings. Although they have primitive sensitivity to physical events around them, they have no brain to interpret those events and to decide what to do about them. Animals do make decisions and most of the time they are using their senses to help them make those decisions. Perhaps the nervous system first evolved in order to transmit messages from sense organs to the muscles and glands and other parts of the body. But it is a giant leap from the primitive sensitivity of a simple multicellular organism to the majesty of perception that we enjoy. We owe our present state of understanding of the senses not only to thousands of present-day scientists studying the fantastic structure and performance of sense organs but to philosophers like Plato, Descartes and Bishop Berkeley and physicists like Newton, Maxwell, Helmholtz and Mach. Even Leonardo da Vinci had a little influence on the way that we think about our senses!

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About the 1982 CHRISTMAS LECTURES: Common Sense

Our sense organs are windows on the world. But just like windows, as well as giving us a view of the physical world, the senses also restrict our outlook on the things around us. Philosophers have worried for centuries about the reliability of the human senses and about the relationship between the real world and the world as we see, hear and feel it. Is the world only a creation of our minds? I am no philosopher, so I am happy to accept that there is a real world out there and that our sense organs simply describe it to our brains. But this means that the world we know through our perceptions is created by processes in our brains and the validity of this imagined world depends crucially on the way that our sense organs and our brains work together to perform the magic of perception. My aim in these lectures is to describe the way that the sense organs act as biological instruments of detection, measurement and analysis. I shall try not to be a ‘human chauvinist’ but will show that our senses, perfect though they are for our needs, are only a small part of the repertoire of biological instruments of detection and measurement that evolution has invented. It is hard to accept that our perception of things around us is incomplete, but the fact is that we are blind and deaf to much that is happening in the world. We sense what we need to sense. Every animal lives in its own perceptual world, a world of its own creation. Let us be proud of the incredible performance of our own sense organs and brains but let us not forget that other creatures have marvellous sense organs that we do not. They live in other worlds, in perceptual worlds created by their own particular sense organs, worlds that we can never experience directly but can only dream about.Join me in these lectures on a journey to the edges of your own perceptual world and into the sensory worlds of other animals. I shall give the members of the audience plenty of opportunities to test their own senses and to discover how they work, and we shall be joined, from time to time, by animals who will show us all how very clever their sense organs are!
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About Colin Blakemore:

Sir Colin Blakemore (1 June 1944 – 27 June 2022) was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain. His own research work was mainly concerned with the mechanisms in the brain for the interpretation of signals from the eyes, and especially in the early development of vision during the first few days and weeks of an animal’s life. He was well known for his work in communicating science to the public and published many popular books.

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