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• The biology of perception
• Puzzling questions

Perception is the quality of being aware of the conditions in one's environment. For example, visual perception refers to the ability of an organism to see objects in the world around it. Other forms of perception involve the senses of touch, smell, taste, and sound.

Perception is not a passive activity. That is, one way to think of visual perception is to say that light rays bounce off an object an enter one's eyes. Those light rays then create a "sight" message that travels to the person's brain where the object is recorded. But that explanation is incomplete. The brain also acts on the message received from the eyes in ways that are not totally understood by scientists. The important point is that the real world is not necessarily the world that one perceives.

A classic experiment...