From: Aaron Philby


Hi. I recently found your webpage about how the brain thinks. I have a question I've been thinking about a lot recently and talking about with friends. "Pattern recognition" is not considered a sense in the the same way that sight, smell, taste, touch, and hear are considered senses. What is the reason that "Pattern recognition" itself, is not a sense? I know that we can recognize more complex patterns as we learn and grow and what have you, which is different from how our vision and hearing and the other senses get duller over time, but apart from this, how is "pattern recognition" not just a sense that we have that examines data that comes into our brain via the other senses? Thanks for your time

Aaron



Aaron,

I would say the word "sense" normally implies that some condition outside the nervous system is being turned into nerve impulses that can be processed by the brain. Pattern recognition uses nerve impulses to compute other impulses, so it's happening totally inside the nervous system.

Bob



cool! Wow. thank you so much for the response (: That helps a lot.

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