There's Something M ss ng / Clarification of the ???? post

This was taken from the link above
We can recognize a friend instantly—full-face, in profile, or even by the back of his head. We can distinguish millions of shades of color, as well as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf. It all seems so effortless: we open our eyes or ears and let the world stream in.
Yet anything we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste requires billions of nerve cells to flash urgent messages along cross-linked pathways and feedback loops in our brains, performing intricate calculations that scientists have only begun to decipher.
"You can think of sensory systems as little scientists that generate hypotheses about the world," says Anthony Movshon, an HHMI investigator at New York University. Where did that sound come from? What color is this, really? The brain makes an educated guess, based on the information at hand and on some simple assumptions.
To resolve ambiguities and make sense of the world, the brain also creates shapes from incomplete data. We construct such images unconsciously and very rapidly. Our brains are just as fertile when we use our other senses. In moments of anxiety, for instance, we sometimes "hear things" that are not really there.
Everything we know about the world comes to us through our senses. Traditionally, we were thought to have just five of them—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
Scientists now recognize that we have several additional kinds of sensations, such as pain, pressure, temperature, joint position, muscle sense, and movement, but these are generally included under "touch." (The brain areas involved are called the "somatosensory" areas.)
Although we pay little attention to them, each of these senses is precious and almost irreplaceable—as we discover, to our sorrow, if we lose one. People usually fear blindness above all other disabilities. Yet deafness can be an even more severe handicap, especially in early life, when children learn language.
What we perceive through our senses is quite different from the physical characteristics of the stimuli around us. We cannot see light in the ultraviolet range, though bees can, and we cannot detect light in the infrared range, though rattlesnakes can. Our nervous system reacts only to a selected range of wavelengths, vibrations, or other properties. It is limited by our genes, as well as our previous experience and our current state of attention.
What draws our attention, in many cases, is change. Our senses are finely attuned to change. Stationary or unchanging objects become part of the scenery and are mostly unseen. Customary sounds become background noise, mostly unheard. The feel of a sweater against our skin is soon ignored. Our touch receptors, "so alert at first, so hungry for novelty, after a while say the electrical equivalent of 'Oh, that again,' and begin to doze, so we can get on with life," writes Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses.
If something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger—or opportunity.
Nearly all sensory signals go first to a relay station in the thalamus, a central structure in the brain (named after the Greek word for "couch" because the cerebral hemispheres seem to rest comfortably on it). The messages then travel to primary sensory areas in the cortex (a different area for each sense). There they are modified and sent on to "higher" regions of the brain. Somewhere along the way, the brain figures out what the messages mean.
Many factors enter into this interpretation, including what signals are coming in from other parts of the brain, prior learning, overall goals, and general state of arousal.