42. Sensory Function

This lecture begins by discussing the importance to homeostasis of monitoring an organism’s external environment. We examine the sensory systems that carry out this function, delving as deep as the ion- channel mechanisms that underpin all the primary methods animals use to detect external stimuli. In addition, different types of sensory receptors divide stimuli into several modalities or qualities and can be further tuned to detect a narrow range of values within a modality. The lecture concludes by noting that much of what we as humans experience as being the outside world is, in fact, a creation produced by the brain from basic sensory stimuli.