January Scibar: Seeing sounds: how we make sense of a multisensory world

Date: Monday 13^th January 2020
Speaker: Dr Clare Jonas.

“Seeing sounds: how we make sense of a multisensory world”

The brain can do some incredibly complex things like plotting novels, calculating rocket trajectories and keeping us balanced on bikes. But it also does some amazing things that we don’t even notice most of the time, like sorting out the massive amount of sensory information we encounter every day to make a coherent account of what the world is like.

In this talk, we’ll play some games that illustrate how the brain manages this feat (don’t worry, you won’t call you up on stage), as well as learning about what happens when you lose a sense, what the world is like for people with different ways of integrating the senses like synaesthesia, and how to fool wine buffs with food dye.

Dr Clare Jonas used to be a psychology researcher, but is now a science communicator. In her spare time, she writes That Thinking Feeling, a blog which explores how psychology can answer everyday questions like why we have superstitions and how songs get stuck in our heads.